Does little to rehabilitate Buck’s literary reputation, but respectfully resets her life and work in its appropriate...
A biographical consideration of Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), an author few take seriously today.
Conventional wisdom dictates that Buck—whose bestselling novel The Good Earth (1931) captured the difficulties of life among poor farmers in rural China—is at best an important footnote in 20th-century American literature. Whatever accolades that novel earned her (including the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes), many critics agree that she squandered her talents in her late career on thin, sentimental books. Spurling (Matisse the Master, 2005, etc.) doesn’t deny her subject’s serious shortcomings as a writer, but she adds valuable perspective by explaining the complicated circumstances of her rise to literary stardom. The daughter of American missionaries, Buck (nee Sydenstricker) spent the bulk of her childhood in parts of China characterized by hard living. The people her parents were hoping, and usually failing, to convert were subsistence farmers whose livelihoods were routinely unsettled by abusive rival warlords. Pearl’s father was hard-headed and often absent, and her mother was often ill. The young girl took refuge in authors like Charles Dickens, though Western novels were poor preparation for the culture shock she experienced when she moved to the United States to attend college. Buck channeled her frustration with Westerners’ misunderstandings about China into essays, stories and ultimately The Good Earth; in doing so, she had the support of her first husband, John Lossing Buck, a scholar on Chinese agriculture. Those writings earned her a place as a leading American spokesperson on the Chinese people, correcting numerous racist misconceptions. But Communist China eventually rejected Buck’s efforts, and Spurling somberly depicts the novelist as a woman without a country. After her success, she wrote mostly to provide financial support to her daughter, who was afflicted with phenylketonuria. Buck’s marriage eventually failed and her writings grew increasingly irrelevant, but Spurling speeds through this decline, emphasizing her high points as a leading novelist and advocate for China’s everyday citizens.
Does little to rehabilitate Buck’s literary reputation, but respectfully resets her life and work in its appropriate contexts.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4042-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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