A guarded, and frequently routine, presentation of a life that might receive a more searching treatment after it ends.
Financial Times literary editor Dalley presents this detailed portrait of the charming and elusive Lady Diana Mosley—highborn society beauty, writer, and fascist.
Much has been written about Diana’s sisters Unity (infatuated with Hitler), Nancy (the celebrated novelist), and Deborah (the Duchess of Devonshire). But this is the first biography of Diana, the wife of the mercurial and notorious Sir Oswald Mosley (leader of the British Union of Fascists). Still alive and quite unrepentant in her late 80s, Diana in her youth was rather more than a free spirit. Her leaving the wealthy Bryan Guinness to become Mosley’s mistress had scandalized London society, true enough. But her late-night chats with Hitler, her frequent appearances at Goebbels’s villa, and her schemes to set up a specially built radio station in Germany to propagandize southeast England during the late 1930s attracted the interest of British Intelligence. When the war broke out, she was imprisoned until 1943 and remained under house arrest for the remainder of the conflict. She and her husband flirted with anti-Semitic and right-wing organizations after the war, but reputation, tax exile, and the burdens of aristocratic life limited their political involvements: Oswald would climb back on the horse and run a couple of times for a seat in Parliament, while Diana would edit such terms as “fuzzie wuzzies” or “hottentots” out of his political writings on Africa (which Oswald envisioned as the future “estate” of an united European nation). Dalley argues that Diana’s life is an example of the search for a coherence during turbulent times, but she rarely offers any comment on Diana’s moral imagination beyond remarks about standing by her man or adhering to the things that mattered most to her. And Dalley’s research is compromised (to put it mildly) by Mosley’s refusal to grant her access to her unpublished papers and diaries until after her death.
A guarded, and frequently routine, presentation of a life that might receive a more searching treatment after it ends.Pub Date: May 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-394-58736-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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