Rollyson (The Lives of Norman Mailer, 1991, etc.) piles on the details but never gets to the novelist, critic, and essayist known as Dame Rebecca West, born Cecily Fairfield (she borrowed her pen name from an Ibsen character). Her career stretched from 1911 when, still a teenager, she began writing for the British feminist journal Freewoman, to the publication of 1900, which appeared when she was 90 years old. West was once notorious for her affairs: Her lovers included Charlie Chaplin, writer John Gunther, and Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate. Most important though, was her long association with H.G. Wells, with whom she had an illegitimate child, the writer Anthony West. Anthony's lifelong anguish and anger are evident in his letters to his famous father: `` . . . listen, little sadist sweetheart . . . you've made me realize what a little wart you are.'' Rollyson does a solid job of showing—mostly through letters from the hitherto restricted Yale collection—how West bridled against convention and the mores of the times but was also guilt- ridden and ambivalent about her roles as mother and as Wells's ``kept'' woman. Her marriage to banker Henry Maxwell Andrews, while more conventional, was plagued by a series of illnesses and infidelities, his and hers. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), considered West's masterpiece, a massive profile and history of Yugoslavia at the outset of WW II, ``interweaves . . . description, reportage, autobiography, literary criticism, philosophy, theology, and feminism,'' and has been been praised as everything from a travel guide to ``an account of civilization and its discontents.'' Rollyson generally does an adequate job of summing up West's works, particularly her novels. But his lifeless writing often settles for a mere catalog of illnesses, lovers, and political battles; even his use of the letters fails to bring West to life. All of the juice has been squeezed out of the details of a long, rich, unique life. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-19430-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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