A thorough, well-written biography of an enigmatic figure.
The story of the little-known Violet Gibson (1876–1956), who shot Italian ruler Benito Mussolini on April 7, 1926, but failed in her assassination attempt.
London-based cultural historian Saunders (The Devil’s Broker: Seeking Gold, God, and Glory in Fourteenth-Century Italy, 2005, etc.) unearths an impressive amount of information about Gibson. Born to an influential family in Dublin, Gibson had been slated for a comfortable life in high society. Unlike her sisters, however, she refused to marry well and rear children. Instead, she studied a variety of fringe religions and mystic philosophers before settling on Catholicism as her guiding faith and leaving Ireland forever. Eventually settling in Rome, the isolated, lonely Gibson decided she must assassinate the increasingly imperialist Mussolini because God wanted her to slay a bad man. Despite the normally high state of security surrounding the dictator, the frail, white-haired Gibson walked up to him on Rome’s Campidoglio Square and fired at his face. The bullet grazed his nose. When Gibson tried to shoot again, her weapon failed to discharge. By then, Mussolini had moved away and Gibson had been immobilized by members of the crowd. Unsurprisingly, Gibson ended up in a jail cell. After years of legal maneuvering, she was confined to an insane asylum until she died in custody 30 years after the assassination attempt. In addition to documenting Gibson’s outer and inner lives during the three decades of incarceration, Saunders skillfully describes the continued ascendancy of Mussolini, whose life was ultimately unaffected by the assassination attempt. Though it’s difficult to decipher whether Gibson should be remembered as a courageous heroine or a briefly violent insane person, it’s obvious that the more Saunders learned about her, the more the author came to admire her subject.
A thorough, well-written biography of an enigmatic figure.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9121-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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