A biography notable for its deep research.
The enigmatic novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) inspires a new investigation.
In his literary debut, Hull (Spanish & Latin American Studies/Univ. of Chester) minutely examines the plot, characters, context, creation, reception, filming, and afterlife of Greene’s 1958 satirical novel, Our Man in Havana. Drawing on Greene’s published and unpublished writings; studies and biographies of Greene; abundant archival material; and his own 17 visits to Cuba, Hull sets Greene’s life amid Cuba’s tumultuous history. Compared to “the Hemingway cult in Havana,” Greene’s “many visits to his preferred watering and feeding hole,” Hull laments, have gone unacknowledged. He aims to correct this oversight by meticulously documenting every step that Greene took, every diary entry he logged, and every letter he wrote to his wife and several mistresses concerning his many visits to Cuba and the writing and filming of his novel. Despite Hull’s valiant efforts, though, his portrait of Greene is overly familiar: a troubled man, restless, self-absorbed, and moody, a manic-depressive who sought relief from his “tormented self” (as well as his many romantic crises) by traveling to “risky, seedy, and distant troubled locations.” Among the seediest was pre-Castro Cuba, reputed to be “an uninhibited tropical paradise,” where gambling casinos, brothels, bars, and risqué nightclubs flourished. Beginning in 1954, with an unplanned two-night detour to Havana, Greene, with his “magnetic attraction to seediness,” partook of all Cuba’s offerings, including copious alcohol and illicit drugs. During many of his visits, Greene had little contact with Cubans, and the idea for Our Man in Havana originated, Hull reveals, in 1944, when a Brazilian film director asked Greene for a film outline and Greene decided to write a Secret Service comedy based on his own wartime observations. Although he did not draw on Cuban politics to represent duplicity and bungling among agents and politicians, Hull asserts that the novel reflected Cold War paranoia and proved prescient in its foreshadowing of the Cuban missile crisis.
A biography notable for its deep research.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-018-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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