By giving both sides of an ongoing written conversation, this useful collection offers an unusual portrait of a long and important literary friendship. From Stein's thank-you note written in late 1934, the month after Stein and Wilder first met in Chicago, to Wilder's 1946 note of condolence to Alice Toklas following Stein's death, the letters record a warm friendship marked by a sharing of ideas, friends, and (perhaps not least significantly) a belief in Stein's genius. Wilder is the chattier of the two, whether reporting from Vienna that he has visited Freud, who informs him that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's works, or from New York, noting that Mabel Luhan's effort to hold a weekly salon has failed. Wilder is forthright in discussing Stein's influence on his work, and in a 1937 letter says that the third act of Our Town "is based on your ideas, as on great pillars." That Stein in turn appreciates Wilder's talent is apparent in her attempt to persuade him to collaborate on her novel Ida: "a really truly novel is too much for me all alone we must do it together." Throughout, the letters are enhanced by thorough annotations that help make them accessible to a wide audience by supplying details on contemporary events and people, explaining allusions, offering speculations, and even editorializing when, the editors say, "texts appear to ask for it." Likewise, the addition of useful supplementary appendices (on Stein's 1934-35 U.S. lecture tour; and on what occupied Wilder and Stein during WW II, when they exchanged few letters) help round out the scene surrounding the correspondence. Perhaps the most convincing marker of the success of this collection is that, in addition to conveying so much about these correspondents, it prompts one to regret anew the decline of letter writing.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-06774-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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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