An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn’s reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave...
Loneliness, love, and a rebellious spirit are revealed through a writer’s intimate letters.
Somerville makes an impressive book debut with a life of novelist, journalist, and intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), told through a captivating selection of her letters to friends, family, husbands, and lovers. The volume is enriched by Somerville’s biographical narrative and her decision to include responses of many recipients and, in some cases, letters between individuals who were especially significant in Gellhorn’s life: letters, for example, between Gellhorn’s second husband, Ernest Hemingway, and her mother, Edna Gellhorn. Edna was her daughter’s polestar and champion: “I love you best of anybody,” Gellhorn wrote to her before she went off to report in Vietnam. “I’ll love you as long as I live, and admire you wholeheartedly out of the whole world.” Gellhorn loved Eleanor Roosevelt, too, whom she counted as a friend and confidante. “Dearest Mrs. R.,” Gellhorn wrote, was “an absolutely unfrightened selfless woman whose heart never went wrong.” To Gellhorn’s impassioned raging against injustice, oppression, and the horror of war, Roosevelt was unfailingly sympathetic and wise but also calmly forthright about Americans’ reluctance “to do much in the way of sacrificing to help the people who are suffering in other lands.” By the time Gellhorn married Hemingway in 1940, both were already famous, and the marriage made news. But despite playful, loving letters to her “Beloved Bug,” she came to find Hemingway moody and volatile; “a man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being,” she wrote to her mother when she decided to divorce him. Although she had many affairs and countless friends, she confessed that her abiding loneliness could not “be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one.”
An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn’s reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave woman.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-228-10186-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Firefly
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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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