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
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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