An exhaustive and perhaps definitive biography of the celebrated French writer and thief (1910-86), who looks almost human through the eyes of the much tamer White (The Beautiful Room is Empty, 1988, etc.). It's to Genet's credit that, once he became famous enough to establish a public persona, he quite frankly assumed the role of a criminal outcast. The son of an unknown father and an impoverished mother, Genet was raised in a dreary succession of orphanages and foster homes. As a child, he showed signs of great intelligence and creativity, but, as a ward of the state, he couldn't be educated for anything other than manual labor. Incorrigible and fiercely independent, he turned to theft at an early age and spent most of his adolescent years in reform schools and prisons. It was during this period that he became conscious of his homosexuality; throughout the rest of his life, he tried to insulate himself in masculine societies that re-created the brutal and isolated asylums of his youth. ``Boiling over with contradictions, Genet was cruel and sensitive,'' says White, ``a moralist who stole from friends, a petty thief who forged copies of his own quite genuine masterpieces.'' Genet's early writings—Our Lady of the Flowers and The Miracle of the Rose—brought him to the attention of Cocteau and the surrealists, but it was the patronage of Sartre that made Genet famous—and that brought him a pardon from the president of France. Ironically, Genet found it more difficult to write as a free man than as a prisoner, and, in his later years, he nearly stopped working altogether. He finally left France for Morocco (where he's buried) and took up the cause of the Palestinians. A thorough and painstaking job that, however, could have been accomplished in half the space. Scholars will find Genet essential; most others will find a lot to skim. (Useful notes; 16 pages of photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-57171-1
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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