A lucid, unvarnished biography of novelist Kingsley Amis (who died in 1995), father of Martin and one of Britain’s famously outsize literary personalities. Jacobs, a London-based journalist for more than 30 years, timed his research perfectly: When he began interviewing Kingsley Amis for this book, the septuagenarian was still in good health, his spiky, contrarian wit undimmed. Over the course of two and a half years, the two men met frequently in Amis’s favorite pubs, where the author regaled the journalist with bizarre anecdotes, caustic opinions, and bawdy rhymes. Amis seemed to enjoy recounting his florid past, and’seen through the amber glaze of many a single-malt Macallan—it gained clarity and sharpness. Jacobs observed, however, that Amis’s physical life had become sharply constricted, his body heavy and leaden, almost monstrously childlike. Yet Amis was always a man of contrasts, his emotional neediness and hypochondria offset still by fierce, dismissive intellect. One of the most prolific and plainspoken authors of his generation, Amis wrote 24 novels—including his famous, award-winning debut, Lucky Jim—and more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and criticism. There was nothing in his past to suggest it: Amis was the only son of a business clerk, and his ascent from the perfect obscurity of lower-middle-class London was largely self-willed. But he never quite fit in with his literary peers. Not only was he famously outspoken, he also wrote popular books—an aesthetic decision rooted in his own sense of egalitarianism. As Jacobs explains, Amis did not believe in books —you had to read another book to understand.— Nor does Jacobs himself, who has written an evenhanded and refreshingly direct profile of the man: the soldier, the husband, the father, the boozer, the adulterer, and, above all, the novelist. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18602-9
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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