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GIVING UP

Name: GIVING UP
Author: Jillian Becker
ISBN: 0-312-31598-8

THE LAST DAYS OF SYLVIA PLATH

by Jillian Becker ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2003

Thoughtful and intelligent: a welcome corrective to the legend.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.