A well-documented examination of a once-prominent radical.
An intimate portrait of a noted public intellectual.
In a richly detailed biography of writer, editor, and political pundit Max Eastman (1883-1969), Irmscher (English/Indiana Univ.; Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, 2013, etc.) draws on his subject’s prolific published works and abundant archival sources, including vast numbers of letters to and from his many lovers. In his own autobiography, Eastman made much of his love affairs, and Irmscher allows them to dominate a biography that reiterates Eastman’s erotic poems, protestations of desire, and his lovers’ ecstatic responses. Eastman was handsome, attractive, and apparently irresistible to women, even into his 80s. Probably a virgin when he married the strong-willed Ida Rauh, he felt immediate remorse: “I had lost, in marrying Ida, my irrational joy in life,” he proclaimed. That joy could be enhanced by all the women “waiting for him, women who wanted to receive him with open arms.” His three wives—he divorced Ida, virtually abandoning her and their son—acquiesced to his affairs, though they were often considerably hurt. When not focused on Eastman’s sex life, Irmscher traces the evolution of his political thought from socialist to radical conservative. As a student at Columbia, he was influenced by John Dewey, who embodied, Eastman believed, “the essence of democracy.” He rallied to keep America out of World War I, and with his activist sister, he campaigned for women’s suffrage. He established his reputation as editor of the leftist journals The Masses and The Liberator, and he publicized and translated Leon Trotsky. But in the 1930s, he became ardently convinced that a spreading “communist conspiracy” threatened American democracy. As Irmscher discovered, “there was no detail of alleged communist infiltration that escaped his attention.” From having friends like John Reed and Edna St. Vincent Millay, he preferred the company of “free market advocates, right-wingers, and libertarians.” In his critical works, he derided the “linguistic gimmickry” of modernist writers and found a home for his views in Reader’s Digest.
A well-documented examination of a once-prominent radical.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-22256-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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