While occasionally crotchety about personal travails, Malcolm offers a stirring, roving chronicle of “our poet of the...
A typically sharp-eyed, tart tour by longtime New Yorker writer Malcolm (The Crime of Sheila McGough, 1999, etc.) to the places—and the creative landscape—associated with the Russian master.
Playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) has become as misunderstood as he is beloved, Malcolm feels, not just by critics but by his homeland. As she travels to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and especially Gurzuv and Yalta (where Chekhov spent his last five years), Malcolm fumes at post-Communist Russia—not just at inconveniences such as lost luggage and seedy hotels, but at guides who sometimes seem more interested in palaces or old-time film star Deanna Durbin than they do in Chekhov. She grumps about this “absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an ‘original scene’ that can only fall short of his expectations.” Occasionally, Malcolm resorts to one of her trademark cranky generalities about factual writing (a novice journalist, she insists, who wishes to render subjects “in all their unruly complexity and contradictoriness is soon disabused”). But once she considers Chekhov’s life and work in earnest, her numerous insights run against the critical grain without falling into contrarianism for its own sake. For instance, she notes that far from being nonjudgmental, Chekhov underscores the nature of evil in stories such as “Ward No. 6”; that despite his overriding concern with ordinary lives, he was irresistibly attracted to useless beauty; and that, as someone who battled tuberculosis for almost a third of his life, his masterpieces obliquely tell what it is like to live under the constant shadow of death. She seamlessly stitches together both standard biographical information (such as his attitude toward his brutal and improvident father) and close analysis and interpretation (e.g., of memoirists’ varying accounts of Chekhov’s death, including the bizarre transport of his corpse back to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car filled with oysters).
While occasionally crotchety about personal travails, Malcolm offers a stirring, roving chronicle of “our poet of the provisional and fragmentary.”Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50668-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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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