A richly introspective biography sure to rekindle interest in Hardy’s writing.
Another wonderfully readable life by veteran biographer and journalist Tomalin (Samuel Pepys, 2002, etc.).
She always builds a good story, and this slow but touching biography of the mild-mannered provincial architect from Dorchester who created seething novels about inequity and thwarted ambition is no exception. Tomalin begins at the death in 1912 of Hardy’s once-beloved first wife Emma, from whom he grew estranged in their last years; evidently he began to compose poetry seriously at this juncture as a way of revisiting their romance and his early life. Born in 1840 to a domestic servant who had to hurry up and get married before his birth, Hardy later became aware that he was an unwanted child whose existence stunted his mother’s chances of bettering herself. He served as an apprentice to an architect in Dorchester, then quit to seek his literary fortunes in London, attending reform meetings and making publishing contacts. After marrying wellborn Cornishwoman Emma Gifford, he settled back in Dorset to build his own house and live quietly among the laboring villagers. The humiliating rejection of his early novels rankled, and for many years after he finally got published, it was in serial form for quick money, much like Dickens and Eliot. Far from the Madding Crowd, which delineated the grim rural life that Hardy knew intimately, made his reputation as a socialist, feminist and gorgeous describer of nature. Hardy’s worldview grew more pessimistic, “marked by a fierce questioning of accepted ideas about society,” and it is evidenced in works including The Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Hardy’s bleak rewrite of the Book of Job, Jude the Obscure. Tomalin thoughtfully considers these works, and the poignant marriage of Hardy to Em, in a text brimming with insight.
A richly introspective biography sure to rekindle interest in Hardy’s writing.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-59420-118-8
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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
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