Pervasive, deep research informs this inspiring story of a writer who demonstrably earned such a sturdy, illuminating...
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
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
