And without that mitigating achievement, this author’s life, retold at excruciating length, seems merely a sad, sordid waste.
Overly detailed biography of the critically esteemed author limns every up and down in his self-destructive life.
Mind you, there’s no way to write about Richard Yates (1926–92) without spending a lot of time describing alcoholic seizures, nervous breakdowns, and ghastly coughing fits resulting from lung damage sustained during WWII and exacerbated by heavy smoking. The son of ill-matched parents who split when he was three, Yates hardly ever saw his father after the divorce and grew up to despise his feckless, alcoholic mother. Yates seems never to have recovered from his dreadful childhood, and although his early short stories won him a devoted literary agent (Monica McCall) and some magazine sales, their bleak point of view was already prompting the uneasy reactions that would always limit his commercial success, though fellow writers were—and continue to be—awed by the elegance, economy, and bitter honesty of his prose. Revolutionary Road, nominated for a National Book Award in 1961, cemented his reputation as a painfully acute observer of the discontents of the American middle class, but it took him eight years to write its flawed successor, A Special Providence, and his personal demons increasingly dominated his life. Although he recovered his artistic equilibrium in the’70s with Disturbing the Peace and The Easter Parade, Yates was almost always broke and lived in horrifying squalor. A shuffling, shabby, prematurely old man, he died at 66 when his abused body failed to recover from minor surgery. Bailey (The Sixties, not reviewed) tells this heartbreaking story adequately, writing smoothly about Yates’s two failed marriages, his devotion to his three daughters, his friendships with various literary figures (Seymour Lawrence and Andre Dubus among them), his influence on his creative-writing students as an exemplar of the committed artist. But though he spends many pages quibbling with bad reviews, the biographer doesn’t really convey the qualities that make Yates’s work so distinctive.
And without that mitigating achievement, this author’s life, retold at excruciating length, seems merely a sad, sordid waste.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28721-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
SEEN & HEARD
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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