Engaging profiles of women who found metaphorical rooms of their own in interwar London.
A group portrait of five celebrated female writers who declined to ride shotgun for the men who drove British literary life from World War I through 1940.
Debut author Wade, who edits the London-based White Review, puts a new spin on the old idea of topographical resonance—the belief that you are what you inhabit—in a book about trailblazing women who lived on Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury at times that occasionally overlapped. The author uses Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone for the social and intellectual equality her subjects craved when they moved to the square, drawn partly by its cheap rents and proximity to the British Museum. Economic historian Eileen Power, one of them, scoffed at the idea that “the ideal wife should endeavor to model herself upon a judicious mixture of a cow, a muffler, a shadow, a mirror,” a variation on a sentiment that others in the book seemed broadly to share, if they expressed it less bluntly. The poet H.D. briefly shared her flat with D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda. The detective novelist Dorothy Sayers wrote her first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery in Mecklenburgh Square, five years before the arrival of the intrepid classicist Jane Harrison, who visited ancient ruins and smoked a pipe on the steps of the Parthenon. The unlucky Woolf moved in a year before the first bombs fell on London and, after an explosion destroyed her house, found “mushrooms sprouting on the carpets.” At times, Wade overreaches or strains to link the women, most of whom weren’t friends: Each, she writes, “sought to reinvent her life” in the square, a brute-force cliché at odds with her subjects’ more original thinking. But the author has a jeweler’s eye for sparkling anecdotes, and Bloomsbury ultimately emerges as far more than an anchorage for bohemians who “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.”
Engaging profiles of women who found metaphorical rooms of their own in interwar London.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-451-49779-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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