Eisler skillfully incorporates much correspondence within a frame of lively writing.
Largely expanded from her previous literary study, Chopin's Funeral (2003), Eisler's latest explores the ways in which the early French novelist Sand (1804–76) extracted her literary, intellectual and political sustenance from her numerous lovers.
As notorious for her free-loving personal life and cross-dressing fashion as for her atmospheric, revolutionary novels, Sand, née Aurore Dupin, learned early on that freedom for a woman was gained through linking oneself to a powerful man. Eisler goes well into this pleasant-going study on Sand's early sense of abandonment by her mother, Sophie Delaborde, a “pure-blooded daughter of the proletariat” and probable prostitute whose livelihood in Paris ensured that her daughter would be raised by her formidable grandmother at Aurore's dead father Maurice Dupin's Nohant estate. Sophie essentially sold her daughter to the rich Dupin relatives, and the tug of war between Aurore's grandmother and mother took its toll on the young girl. Liaisons with strong, intelligent men formed her early development, while marriage to minor Gascon Baron Casimir Dudevant brought her stimulation and travel, as well as two children. Separation and a dizzying succession of lovers—including affairs early on with the much younger Jules Sandeau, from whom Sand fashioned her nom de plume, and Le Figaro's powerful editor Henri Latouche—launched her on a literary career. Her first novel, Indiana (1832), about the failure of a miserable marriage set in a typically exotic outpost, swept Paris and set the tone for a succession of romances about proto-feminist relationships: Valentine, Lélia, Mauprat, etc. Curiously, Sand was also mightily attracted to weak-willed, brilliant younger men who needed maternal nursing, such as Alfred de Musset and Frédéric Chopin, and Eisler does a fine job of trying to integrate the many sides of this complex writer and political activist without capitulating to her charm and fame. Indeed, Eisler remains a rather severe moral critic of this fascinating, and rule-bending, personality.
Eisler skillfully incorporates much correspondence within a frame of lively writing.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-58243-349-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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