For die-hard Byron fans only.
A disappointing biography of the two most significant women in Byron’s life: wife Annabella and half-sister Augusta, who was also his lover.
Crane (Lord Byron’s Jackal, 1999) argues that Lady Byron and Augusta Leigh were bitter enemies because each made the mistake of loving the poster child for English Romanticism’s destructive tendencies. Byron seduced them both, then left both high and dry. In a sense, he married Annabella in 1815 to escape his incestuous passion for Augusta, but in fact he was happier flouting convention than living the married life, especially when that life involved responsibility for children and the mountain of debt he’d accumulated as a bachelor. Annabella realized early in their marriage that she was doomed to unhappiness, while Augusta distanced herself from the love of her life. Rumors of Byron’s affair with Augusta circulated at around the same time he left England for the continent, ruining both their reputations. Crane’s account of all this is competent enough until the narrative comes to a screeching and improbable halt smack in the middle with a fictional account of a meeting between the two women more than 25 years after Byron’s death. Although it serves the author’s purpose of clearly presenting Annabella and Augusta’s relationship of mingled animosity, love, and respect, this character development comes too late and offers too little. Written in an irritating script format composed only of dialogue and notes approximating stage directions, the interlude is stylistically intrusive and psychologically incredible. The restrained emotion and deep insights Crane attributes to both women are more annoying than persuasive, their dialogue is absurd: “You knew that, knew that even if he could escape your malice . . . then you could enjoy all the satisfaction of virtuous revenge,” intones Augusta. It’s hard to believe anyone ever talked in such a manner, even in the mid-19th century.
For die-hard Byron fans only.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40648-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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