A richly detailed and supremely sensitive portrayal of an artist obsessed with the “terrible and magnificent” act of...
A top-notch biography of the Nobel Prize–winning writer, who suffered spiritual crises and suicidal depression.
German biographer and film and theater critic Decker, editor of Theater der Zeit, offers a masterful, penetrating biography of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), adroitly translated by Lewis, that deserves the accolade “definitive.” Drawing on Hesse’s voluminous correspondence (including newly available letters to Stefan Zweig and psychiatrist Josef Lang), autobiographical writings, and 20 volumes of complete works, Decker lays bare Hesse’s complex, contradictory personality, his all-consuming dedication to the creative life, his tormented relationships with women, and the cultural and political forces that found their ways into his works. The son of Pietist missionaries, Hesse rebelled violently against his parents’ fanatical religious beliefs—so violently that his parents committed him to an insane asylum when he was 15. He repeatedly sent his poems and stories to his mother, who repeatedly withheld praise or encouragement; “nothing,” Decker asserts, “could have been more important than being acknowledged by his mother as a writer.” Yearning for her love, he was torn by his need “to distance himself from this world in which art was at best a pretty ornament on the Sunday-best dress of the bourgeoisie.” Although married three times, Hesse was by nature a loner and narcissist: moody, hypochondriacal, and self-absorbed. He could never see a woman as a friend, and he demeaned and ignored his wives and lovers. Yet he was capable of friendship, with German poet Hugo Ball, for one, and Thomas Mann. Several of Hesse’s most famous novels—Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game—“touched the nerve of the age” by portraying a protagonist who felt alienated by society, “an outsider filled with a loathing for the world and self-disgust,” a man striving to reconcile the duality of his personality, or one compelled to wander, though longing for home. “How Ought One to Live?” Hesse asked, again and again.
A richly detailed and supremely sensitive portrayal of an artist obsessed with the “terrible and magnificent” act of creation.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-73788-4
Page Count: 780
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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