This, the life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), is Graham Greene's only biographical venture. Written in the early 1930's, it was not published at the time: Rochester's scandalous reputation as the Restoration's most debauched rake-hell, atheist and pornographer made publishers wary, and delayed for many years a due recognition of his very considerable poetic talents. "He might have been another Donne" had not the infamy of his life overshadowed his art. As it was, Rochester shone brightly for a few years at the head of the "merry gang" of sensualists that flocked about Charles Il in the early days of the Restoration when London cast off Puritanism and all flung themselves into a reckless orgy of merriment. A burnt-out case at 33, Rochester is a perfect subject for Greene who sees him as a "spoiled Puritan" using his wit to wreak vengeance on a corrupt and cynical society, not excluding the King and his many mistresses whom Rochester lampooned mercilessly. It was, as Greene points out, an age when Hobbes set the moral tone; the glitter and repartee at Court masked the most vicious and depraved practices. When banished from royal favor as he frequently was, Rochester continued his madcap adventures by setting himself up as an astrologer or an innkeeper, making love as a porter and traveling the roads as a beggar. Whores and lordly ruffians were his constant companions and when, on his deathbed, he became a penitent and embraced Christianity, friends and enemies scorned the conversion as madness. In the words of a contemporary, Rochester lived "as a torch to light himself to Hell thereby" and Greene charts his passage to that fiery place with the taut, restrained compassion which he always extends to fallen idols and angels.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1974
ISBN: 0140101543
Page Count: 197
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1974
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
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
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