A richly detailed document of the London art scene of the ’60s and an affecting memoir of the artist as a young man.
A memoir of young love and life among literary lions.
Novelist Plante (The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief, 2009, etc.) excerpts from his voluminous diary, here covering his first years in London, chronicling his artistic coming-of-age in the mid-1960s. The author moved in heady circles, counting such artistic luminaries as Francis Bacon, David Hockney and W.H. Auden as friends, and the young writer took in this milieu with a novelist’s attention to detail—and a literary tyro’s self-obsession. This period also marked the beginning of Plante’s long-term romantic relationship with Nikos Stangos, a politically engaged, erudite expatriate Greek—and the subject of The Pure Lover. The evolution of Plante’s relationship with Stangos and his experiences navigating the fraught social circle of London’s art scene are the focus of the narrative. The young Plante groped hungrily for an identity, accumulating political awareness, a sense of Englishness (Plante is a native of Rhode Island), artistic accomplishment, respect and community. As is perhaps inevitable in a diary, the reading experience is periodically bogged down by repetition; there are an awful lot of dinner parties and lunches to get through. But even at this stage, Plante was a crafter of limpid prose, possessed of keen insight and sympathy. He also displays a rare gift for finely wrought characterization. The poet Stephen Spender, an intimate of Plante’s, vividly emerges from these pages as a profoundly endearing sad-uncle figure, an accomplished man of letters beset by insecurity and furtively hiding his homosexuality from his forceful wife, Natasha.
A richly detailed document of the London art scene of the ’60s and an affecting memoir of the artist as a young man.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-188-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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