Carefully researched and sensitively written. Essential.
Neatly interlaced biography profiles a father of New England Transcendentalism and his bestselling daughter.
Bronson and Louisa May Alcott shared a birthday (November 29, 1799 and 1832 respectively) and died within 40 hours of each other in 1888. As Matteson (English/John Jay College) ably shows in his debut, their lives were inextricably intertwined, even during the occasional brief periods when they lived apart. After offering a snapshot of a low point in Bronson’s life, the 1837 auction of furniture, supplies and books from his beloved, failing Temple School, the narrative moves back to his birth on a Connecticut farm and proceeds chronologically thereafter. Young Bronson mystified his parents with his passion for reading. With little formal education, he traveled as a peddler before devoting the rest of his life to educating others—sometimes in schools, sometimes in lectures and “conversations,” sometimes in his writings. Matteson shows all facets of Bronson’s character: his fierce work ethic, his feckless financial ways (the Alcotts were perennially saved from ruin by the kindnesses of friends), his loyalty to his family. An early and ferocious opponent of slavery, he could be a remarkably clear thinker, but he was also clueless about his own foolishness and irresponsibility. Louisa, a tomboy with a temper, seemed at times the living refutation of her father’s genial theories about human development. In her childhood, she sat at the knees of Emerson, Thoreau and other Concord notables. While serving as a nurse during the Civil War, she became severely ill and was treated with a toxic, mercury-based medication that caused her much suffering and shortened her life. Matteson capably describes Louisa’s feverish devotion to her family and to her writing, the failures in love, the struggles to succeed that came to fruition with the publication of Little Women, her subsequent celebrity, travels and literary triumphs.
Carefully researched and sensitively written. Essential.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-05964-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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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