Captivating, gossipy social history.
The tale of a small group of upper-middle-class young women who inhabited the rarefied world of literary London during and after World War II.
Drawing on rich archival sources and the many memoirs, novels, and stories written by his prolific cast of characters, British biographer, novelist, and cultural historian Taylor (The New Book of Snobs, 2017, etc.), winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography, creates a brisk, spirited portrait of the astonishingly beautiful women who “fizzed” around Cyril Connolly, “a genuine literary power-broker, a grand panjandrum, a maker—and breaker—of reputations,” in 1940s Britain. Self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent, “easily wounded, unforgiving, dislikeable, delightful,” according to a male friend, Connolly inspired “unfeigned devotion” in his female admirers. “Whether they were living with him, employed by him, pursued by him or merely wistfully regarded by him from afar,” Taylor writes, “he was the fulcrum on which their existence turned.” Among those in his orbit, the author focuses mostly on four: Lys Lubbock, a devoted caretaker and survivor of a nine-year affair with Connolly; fiery Barbara Skelton, who married him; his editorial assistant, Sonia Brownell, who married George Orwell; and Janetta Parladé, who was 17 when Connolly anointed her his “muse.” Christened “the lost girls” by poet and critic Peter Quennell, they had “spent their adolescence scheming to escape” oppressive, often fractured, family life. Flouting convention and flaunting independence, still, they yearned for security and love. Physically, they were a type: notably attractive, “tallish, slim to the point of skimpiness” (except for Sonia). Financially vulnerable, each spent the war years “moving from place to place and billet to billet as the demands of work, romance and inclination took her.” Living in an unheated bedsitter, they might depend on “an eligible or not so eligible suitor” to pick up the tab at upscale restaurants. “Glamorous, edgy and inimitable,” the lost girls, Taylor concedes, left no indelible legacy except perhaps as a link between emancipated young women of the 1920s and the “Dionysiac hordes of the 1960s and 1970s.”
Captivating, gossipy social history.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64-313315-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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