Erudite and scholarly and brimming with quotations—qualities that will appeal more to those who reside in academe than in...
In an impressive array of pieces—all previously published, most substantially revised—a historian examines the moral views of novelists, politicians and philosophers.
Himmelfarb (The Roads to Modernity, 2004, etc.) deals with figures who for most will range from the familiar (George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill) to the barely known—or unknown (Walter Bagehot, John Buchan). Himmelfarb writes with ease about these figures, as though she has somehow integrated them into her own capaciously conservative philosophy. Sometimes the questions she asks seem trivial: Why, for example, does Dorothea marry Ladislaw? she wonders in her discussion of Middlemarch. But that question sends her to the heart of Eliot’s novel. The author praises Dickens for his moral imagination, for bringing “the poor into the forefront of the culture”—not as some sort of vague “class,” but as individuals. There are flashes of humor, too: In a discussion of Austen, Himmelfarb confesses that she preferred Clueless to the 1996 film Emma, feeling the former was “more in keeping with the spirit of the original.” The author examines, more or less rigorously, the novels written by political figures Disraeli and the aforementioned Buchan. For the latter’s efforts, she has extracted some amusing passages, but she is perhaps a bit quick to excuse his racism and anti-Semitism. There is a graceful review of Penelope Fitzgerald’s book about her relatives, the Knoxes (The Knox Brothers, 2000), concluding that it was the brothers’ “character and beliefs” that made them significant. Not all of the writing is graceful, however. Some passages—especially in her essay on Trilling—are dense with -isms, thick with literary allusions.
Erudite and scholarly and brimming with quotations—qualities that will appeal more to those who reside in academe than in Spoon River.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-56663-624-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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