A revealing companion to Levi’s own considerable body of work, and an uncommonly thoughtful example of biography as...
English biographer Angier (Jean Rhys, 1991) gracefully explores the life of the great Italian writer and Holocaust survivor.
“Auschwitz killed him 40 years later,” declared newspaper headlines when Primo Levi committed suicide in 1987 at the age of 68. Elie Wiesel, Bruno Bettelheim, and other witnesses to genocide concurred, as if to say “even Primo Levi could not survive Auschwitz after all.” But Levi, who chronicled his concentration camp years in such books as The Truce and If This Is a Man, was not driven to kill himself by the haunting memories of that horrible time, writes Angier. Instead, she reveals, the fear of infirmities brought on by advancing years, a gnawing unhappiness over the state of the world, a difficult relationship with an imperious mother, and a lifelong tendency to melancholy all combined to drive the writer to fatal despair. The author knows her subject well and has brought exhaustive research to her task—a difficult one, given Levi’s famous reserve. Angier does not share his reticence, and if there’s a flaw here, it’s that she too often inserts herself as an actor in the narrative. As she wrestles with questions of how much to reveal of Levi’s life, for example, she describes it as a story that “upset some of the clearer ideas of good and evil, some of the higher hopes of human nature that he’d helped us to hang on to, despite everything.” Still, this is a rich, nuanced portrait of a man who lived through the worst horrors imaginable without betraying his fellow sufferers, who carried those memories for four decades, and who survived for as long as he did, as Angier says, “because he decided from the beginning or very near it to observe, understand, and remember every detail of this world.”
A revealing companion to Levi’s own considerable body of work, and an uncommonly thoughtful example of biography as literature in its own right.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11315-7
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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
© 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.
