Here, the odd, legendary, and passionate collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas is eyed with detailed objectivity by London critic Souhami (Gluck: Her Biography, 1989- -not reviewed). ``Gertrude and Alice made a strange looking pair,'' Souhami begins. She calls them ``indomitable,'' ``so emphatically and uncompromisingly themselves that the world could do nothing less than accept them as they were.'' Both children of Jewish immigrants raised near San Francisco, they met in Paris in 1907 when Gertrude was writing The Making of Americans, living with her brother Leo, and collecting the paintings of Matisse and Picasso that first drew the avant-garde to her door. Souhami maps the workings of their 39- year relationship, while giving a sense of Gertrude's voice by quoting her work. ``Their deepest point of agreement, and the focus of much of their shared life, was that Gertrude was a genius,'' the author says, quoting Gertrude as saying, ``Twentieth-century literature is Gertrude Stein.'' According to Souhami, Gertrude, with ``huge personality'' and ``easy laughter,'' wrote, talked, and thought; ``sharp'' Alice ``did the rest.'' But far beyond the daily typing of manuscripts, Alice stood as ``the power behind the throne,'' managing and promoting their mutual image, even publishing Gertrude's writings. Souhami's nonjudgmental (sometimes witty) reporting serves the reader well by scrutinizing this idiosyncratic pairing in all aspects, appealing and not. During WW I, Stein and Toklas distributed supplies to French hospitals. During WW II, they supported resistance fighters, but also used the protection of Bernard Fay (later imprisoned as a collaborator) to stay in France. After Stein's death in 1946, Toklas courageously carried on, her income at times withheld by the Stein family, her apartment walls stripped of the famous paintings. The engaging backstage story to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—and, surprisingly, the first Stein biography in more than a decade. Photographs by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton stand out among 45 illustrations that convey Stein and her world.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-04-440833-1
Page Count: 308
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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