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EMERSON AMONG THE ECCENTRICS

Name: EMERSON AMONG THE ECCENTRICS
Author: Carlos Baker
ISBN: 0-670-86675-X

A GROUP PORTRAIT

by Carlos Baker ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1996

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In his final, unfinished work, literary scholar Baker (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 1969, etc.) views an eclectic collection of individuals through the lens of conventional scholarship. Working from the early 1970s until 1986, the year before he died, Baker set out to show how Emerson's views ``were reflected, contradicted, partly diverged from, or zealously misrepresented'' by his acquaintances. Although the work falls short of this ambitious goal, it offers a glimpse of a set of fascinating people and the points at which their lives touched Emerson's. There are, most notably, Emerson's second wife, Lidian, hovering in the background, chronically ill; Aunt Mary (Mary Moody Emerson), the eccentric par excellence, who considered tact ``only another name for lying''; Bronson Alcott, whose wealth of ideas could not keep his family out of poverty; Henry Thoreau, who spent more time camping in Emerson's house than at Walden Pond; Margaret Fuller, who was intellectually brilliant and emotionally demanding; and Jones Very, a poet who was briefly convinced that he was ``the Second Coming.'' The focus of the narrative shifts from person to person with each chapter, portraying Emerson as the genial and stable center of a tornado of friends, but the image occasionally cracks: Surely a man capable of peering into his son's coffin 15 years after the boy's death is at least a candidate for the title of eccentric. And while Baker presents some of the circle as ``self-appointed disciples'' whom Emerson saw simply as friends, a complaint from Thoreau suggests otherwise: ``He would not meet me on equal terms, but only be to some extent my patron. He would not come to see me, but was hurt if I did not visit him.'' Although this group biography is less than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves remain deeply intriguing.

Pub Date: April 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-670-86675-X

Page Count: 640

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
ERNEST HEMINGWAY SELECTED LETTERS 1917-1961
by Ernest Hemingway & edited by Carlos Baker

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.