Thoughtful and intelligent: a welcome corrective to the legend.
A British writer with whom the poet spent her last weekend perceptively details her final days while offering her own insights into Plath’s death, marriage, and ambitions.
Plath has become an icon, polarizing friends and family as well as admirers, and Becker tries to set the record straight, as she sees it. She believes feminists have falsely hijacked Plath for their cause, failing to recognize that the intensely ambitious poet never “scorned the traditional woman’s role of wife and mother, homemaker and housekeeper.” Becker begins with the bitterly cold Thursday afternoon in February 1963 when Plath phoned and asked if she and her children could visit. Once there, she asked if they could stay overnight. As the two women’s children played, Plath talked bitterly of Assa Wevill, the woman her estranged husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes, was living with. Later, she asked Becker to sit by her bed until she fell asleep, showing her the two bottles of pills and their instructions: two from one bottle at bedtime, two from the other on waking. Saturday night, Plath dressed up and went out to meet someone; Becker speculates it might have been Hughes, seeking a reconciliation. The author details in measured prose the family’s Sunday lunch and Plath’s request that Becker’s husband Gerry take her and the children home afterwards. Her host wasn’t overly concerned: Plath seemed cheerful at lunch, and Becker agreed with the poet’s doctor that the need to take care of her children would keep her alive. She also admits to being tired of coping with Plath, whose need for her attention was relentless and exhausting. In the remaining chapters, Becker ponders the poet’s reasons for taking her life, speculating that a sense of losing her gift might have been as much a factor as her failed marriage. Addressing the myths that have grown up around her friend, Becker wants to reclaim the part not consumed by Plath’s ambition.
Thoughtful and intelligent: a welcome corrective to the legend.Pub Date: May 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31598-8
Page Count: 80
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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