The first official biography of Giuseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa and author of The Leopard, recounted by British journalist (and family friend) Gilmour with an elegance and precision worthy of his subject. When The Leopard was published in 1958 to great acclaim, Lampedusa was already one year dead and entirely unknown as a writer. Intensely shy and self-contained, he did not even begin writing until late in life and left the world no picture of himself save that contained in his portrait of Don Fabrizio, the doomed aristocrat of his novel, whose declining fortunes mirrored that of the Lampedusa family. The last scion of a long line of Sicilian nobility, Lampedusa grew up in a world that had little use—and no role—for him, and he found his only refuge from the tedium of daily life in literature: A voracious reader, he was capable of working his way through entire novels at a single sitting. Ill at ease among intellectuals, Lampedusa made little use of his literary interests until—well into middle age—he began to give informal lectures on English poetry and prose to a small circle of friends. Gradually he formed the notion of writing a novel that would ``preserve'' the nearly vanished world of Sicily's ancien rÇgime, much as the works of Dickens had captured 19th-century London. With marvelous insight and clarity (aided by an unimpeded access to Lampedusa's notes and papers), Gilmour traces the process by which the aging prince came to an understanding of his own history and managed to transform what he himself saw as ``a largely wasted life'' into one of the most controversial and admired novels of the century. A fascinating chronicle: Gilmour writes with the assurance of a seasoned scholar and the ease of a born storyteller.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40183-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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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