An exemplary biography of a not-always-exemplary subject. Sure to be the standard work on Wharton for years to come.
Absorbing life of the expatriate novelist and socialite whose work, though not widely read today, underlies film after film.
She was hailed as both a “citizen of the world” and “the last Victorian writer” when she died 70 years ago. Edith Wharton was indeed an accomplished traveler who transcended idle moneyed tourism to endure a few discomforts in search of an interesting story. Still, as Lee (Virginia Woolf, 1997, etc.) tells us, Wharton came up in wealth and enjoyed every ounce of accumulated privilege, which included the wherewithal to build splendid neo-palaces and restore real ones—and manors and farmhouses and gardens. She lived abroad in post–Gilded Age luxury thanks to the inheritance of three fortunes and, for at least part of her life, a solid income as a writer. Wharton, Lee allows, had the prejudices of her age and class; on her deathbed, she “talked about her love of Balzac, her strong feelings for the Catholic Church and her dislike of Jews.” Yet she was a pioneer who took the circumstances of her own life, such as her unhappy marriage to a depressive alcoholic, and turned them into romans à clef such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. The Wharton who emerges as a vigorous and visible presence in these pages loved life, was at home in many languages and places and was free of other kinds of prejudices; she may be one of the earliest American writers to have used the word “gay” in its modern connotation. She was also a brilliant writer, recognized as such in her time, mentioned in the same breath as Henry James, with whom she had a long relationship—and who is now mentioned less than she, at least “as an indicator for certain subjects: wealth, social status, old New York.”
An exemplary biography of a not-always-exemplary subject. Sure to be the standard work on Wharton for years to come.Pub Date: April 30, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-40004-4
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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