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ALICE ADAMS

Name: ALICE ADAMS
Author: Carol Sklenicka
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2131-0

PORTRAIT OF A WRITER

by Carol Sklenicka ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 2019

Pervasive, deep research informs this inspiring story of a writer who demonstrably earned such a sturdy, illuminating...

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A thorough and often surprising life of the celebrated author of short stories and novels.

Sklenicka, whose earlier biography (Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 2009) earned high praise, returns with an intimate, detailed life of Adams (1926-1999), who did not begin publishing regularly until the mid-1960s. But when she did, she received recognition quickly. By the time she died of heart failure, she had established herself as a gifted, perceptive, and popular writer, publishing stories often in the New Yorker and books with Knopf. As Sklenicka relates, she enjoyed some hefty paydays. The author focuses mostly on a couple areas of Adams’ life: her writing and her active love life. Frequently, Sklenicka points out how deeply Adams drew from her own life to inspire her fiction; she wrote about settings and people that she knew. As Sklenicka reports, frequently, Adams was an attractive woman who displayed a great sense of sexual freedom. One brief marriage was followed by a lengthy cohabitation with another man (it didn’t end well), and once she became financially secure, she enjoyed travel, fine food, and a nice house in San Francisco. Sklenicka also charts Adams’ acceptance of the women’s liberation movement and writes perceptively about her relationship with her gay son. The author doesn’t provide much information about Adams’ work routines, but there is a deep undercurrent of admiration that sometimes bubbles to the surface. “Alice Adams lived for love and for stories,” writes Sklenicka. “Her courage and vulnerability, tenderness and tenacity allowed her to break the strictures of her upbringing and transform her intense emotional sensibility into enduring short stories and novels that illuminate women’s lives in the twentieth century.” Near the end, Sklenicka herself appears in a startling tale about Adams’ ashes.

Pervasive, deep research informs this inspiring story of a writer who demonstrably earned such a sturdy, illuminating biography.

Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4516-2131-0

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- PERSPECTIVES
On Revisiting an Old Favorite

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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.