Morris's life of Pre-Raphaelite/Nordic poetry, medievalist arts and crafts, and socialist politics always makes for a readably overstuffed biography, and MacCarthy (Eric Gill, 1989, etc.) addresses each area knowledgeably and stays sympathetic to her hero. As a paragon of both taste and the Left, Morris inspired much hero-worship that carried over into biographies embarrassed by their paradoxical subject: an uncategorizable craftsman innovating through traditionalism, a Socialist and a businessman, a cuckold by his friend and fellow poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. MacCarthy clearheadedly avoids both the hero worship and the embarrassment, keeping up with both his gradual political transformation from neo-Gothic bohemian to committed if idiosyncratic socialist, and his wide-ranging work in architecture, stained-glass, furniture, textiles, printing, et al. MacCarthy's biography takes its personal cue from Morris as a young Oxford student, desperate for camaraderie to direct his energies (even at the price of being ``Topsy,'' his nicknamed buffoonish persona). Topsy's midlife conversion to socialism surprised his Oxford friends, but MacCarthy makes this maturation understandable and keeps his aesthetic and social ideals unblurred. She also paints a deep emotional portrait of Morris's family relations, especially with his daughters, the worshipful May and the invalid Jenny. Unfortunately, she leaves his wife, Janey, at the fastidious distance she cultivated and villainizes Rossetti, who despite his philandering had a complex relationship with Morris. MacCarthy delicately probes other sensitive aspects of his life but partially neglects Morris's personal depths. The volume is illustrated with his best-known creations and rarer ones, as well as everything from cartoons by Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones to socialist handbills and Kelmscott lettering. A well-crafted labor of love, MacCarthy's biography chronicles the epic works of a man who inspired both Shaw and Yeats and continues to inspire today.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58531-3
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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