Endearingly forthright, buoyant and detailed, Athill's letters tell but one side of a cherished bond, leaving the reader...
The renowned British publisher follows her refreshingly honest series of late-in-life memoirs with a collection of three decades of letters to a fellow writer in New York.
Athill (Somewhere Towards the End, 2009, etc.) spent most of her career as a highly respected editorial director for London publisher André Deutsch, propelling the careers of notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Jean Rhys and Philip Roth. Celebrated for her editing prowess, Athill began publishing short stories and autobiographical works in her mid 40s. After retiring from publishing at age 75, her career as a memoirist hit a steep trajectory. Here Athill illuminates broad swaths of her past, with more than 100 characteristically candid dispatches to poet Edward Field, from 1981 to 2007. With the brisk immediacy and contextual depth that often distinguishes correspondence from memoir, Athill’s letters reveal vivid shades of her colorful personality that heretofore have been most evident in interviews. Matter-of-fact observations detail the minutiae of her daily life: trying to find ribbons for her old typewriter; the eventual, daunting switch to computers; the modest fee for an article she wrote; flowers budding in the garden; bodily functions during illnesses. The author deftly intertwines tales of travels, dinner parties and quirky characters with blunt observations and passages about the life of a writer. Without the balance of Fields’ epistles bridging her letters, however, their extensive dialogue reads like a one-sided conversation. Occasional footnotes and poems are not enough to provide sufficient background, often leaving readers in the dark about the people, places, emotions and events she references.
Endearingly forthright, buoyant and detailed, Athill's letters tell but one side of a cherished bond, leaving the reader eager to see her friend's replies.Pub Date: April 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-06295-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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