Substantial and thoughtful, written with sympathy and affection. (16 pages b&w illustrations; 40 additional b&w...
A critic and novelist (English Settlement, not reviewed, etc.) examines the short, stressful life (1811–63) of the great Victorian writer.
An unabashed Thackeray fan, Taylor begins with the novelist’s death on Christmas Eve and informs us that 2,000 people attended the interment of a man whose prodigious output in periodicals and serial novels exceeded one million words between 1846 and 1850. (He also wrote up to 2,000 letters per year.) In a volume with a generous supply of illustrations (many by Thackeray himself, who had started out as the proverbial starving artist), the author traces the Thackeray family back to a band of Yorkshire yeomen. Later generations worked for the East India Company. (Returning to England from India, where he was born, the five-year-old Thackeray glimpsed Napoleon at St. Helena.) Taylor follows Thackeray through Charterhouse School, then to Cambridge (he left with substantial gambling debts but no degree). After struggling as an artist, Thackeray worked for various publications, most notably Punch, before he began writing novels. He married in 1836, but his wife suffered from mental illness and spent most of her adulthood in private care. Taylor describes keenly the competition between Thackeray and his principal rival, Charles Dickens; their fragile amity was shattered in the late 1850s when Thackeray sided with Dickens’s abandoned wife. (Dickens did write a generous testimonial in Cornhill, the monthly that Thackeray edited.) Taylor portrays Thackeray as a gentle giant (he was 6’3”) and as a man who loved his daughters (he shaved a moustache because it frightened them) and who wrote what Taylor considers the finest of all Victorian novels, Vanity Fair. As Peter Ackroyd did in Dickens (1990), Taylor employs his talents as a novelist to include scraps of invention (e.g., a death notice by George Eliot); he inserts, as well, a couple of discursive interludes. (Scholars, however, will find the notes insufficient and will rue the absence of a chronology and comprehensive list of Thackeray’s works.)
Substantial and thoughtful, written with sympathy and affection. (16 pages b&w illustrations; 40 additional b&w illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0910-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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