Freelance writer Byrne captures little of Frieda von Richthofen Lawrence's unconventional vitality, her independent mind, or her tempestuous marriage with D.H. Frieda, equally careless of her reputations as Lawrence's muse, earth goddess, and obtuse nymphomaniac, never inspired tepid opinions, whether in Lawrence's portraits of her in his novels or in the recent spate of Lawrenciana. The second of three sisters in a minor Junker family, Frieda (18791956) grew up in the militarized Alsace-Lorraine, but after a hasty marriage to an older English professor of etymology, she showed a restlessness and curiosity that led to her involvement in Germany's turn-of-the- century cultural turmoil. Her first important affair—the intellectual aspect of which Byrne neglects—was with a cocaine-addicted psychoanalyst. Her second, which ended her marriage and separated her from her children, was with one of her husband's former students: the then-unknown Lawrence. Byrne skims the early period of the couple's intellectual and passionate attraction during Lawrence's first successes, which Frieda greatly influenced, and her depiction of their fraught later years (punctuated by regular, crockery-shattering fights) dismisses Lawrence's works as though Byrne is aping Frieda's anti-intellectualism. Despite Frieda's frequent disagreements with his ideas of love, sex, and femininity (and her casual infidelities), the spouses remained mutually attracted over 16 years and three continents. Byrne relies superficially on Frieda's compassion and Lawrence's emotional dependency to explain their marital endurance; her simultaneously simplistic and paradoxical portrait of Lawrence as a repressed but outright homosexual only confuses the issue. Compared to Brenda Maddox's insightful D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (1994), Byrne's biography treats Frieda as a lumpen aristocrat stuck obstinately in a mismatch made in Purgatory. A portrait of Frieda that comprehends all of her life's events and none of her spirit. (16 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-019001-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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