A wild, occasionally messy, ultimately enthralling work of biography.
An exhaustive portrait of the author of Dracula and his suppressed emotional life.
Skal (Halloween: The History of America’s Darkest Holiday, 2016, etc.), a cultural historian and horror film and literature critic, delves into Bram Stoker’s life (1847-1912) deeper than others before him—and there have been countless critical considerations of Dracula’s provenance since its appearance in 1897, many of which the author shares here. An exemplary gentleman of a certain class, Dublin-born Stoker embodied the anxieties of the highly charged Victorian era, especially fears about the (sexual) body, disease, miasmal vapors, and blood-borne “contagion” and “degeneration.” Indeed, Stoker gleaned early on as a bedridden child (born at the height of the Irish famine, no less) the ghastly tales his mother told about the cholera epidemic of her youth. Skal underscores how strikingly similar Stoker’s life was to that of Oscar Wilde. They both attended Trinity College, where they absorbed “pseudoscientific theories of mind, body, and eros,” were fascinated by the theater and fairy tales (terrifying theatrical pantomimes, in Stoker’s case), were drawn to the homoerotic work of Walt Whitman (Stoker wrote him bashful fan letters), and were romantically connected to the same woman, Florence Balcombe, who rejected Wilde and married Stoker. Skal uses Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray as a kind of touchstone against which to explore themes of male attraction and “the leprosies of sin,” foretelling Wilde’s public downfall and the “submerged self” that Stoker injected into his character Count Dracula. Mostly, however, Stoker was a man of the theater, the acting manager for the famous actor Henry Irving at London’s Lyceum Theatre for over 25 years, and such a workaholic that Skal wonders how he could have found time to write (stories, criticism, novels) so prolifically. The author also assiduously sifts through Dracula productions from then until today.
A wild, occasionally messy, ultimately enthralling work of biography.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-010-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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