Although Mary Shelley’s life was fascinating, this is not the place to learn about it. The author states clearly that he is...
Most readers know Mary as Percy Shelley’s wife and the author of Frankenstein, but many critics feel her writing deserves more attention. British scholar Williams (Romantic Poetry and Revolutionary Politics, 1989) aims to tell her story and evaluate her position in the 19th-century literary canon.
Mary was the daughter of radical William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to her in 1797). Godwin proved a poor father, neglecting the child who worshipped him and later on marrying a woman she grew to detest. His home teemed with intellectual activity, however, and Mary grew up surrounded by London’s literary elite. Despite her sophistication, Mary was capable of losing her head, and the arrival in 1814 of the notorious atheist and radical Percy Shelley (not yet known as a poet) bowled the girl over entirely. She and her half-sister Claire Clairmont ran off to France with him, Shelley’s abandoned wife killed herself shortly after their return, and within three weeks Percy and Mary were married. This caused a scandal, and soon the three were back in Europe. There followed six years of what can only be called a hippie existence minus birth control (but with better writing). The Shelleys plus Byron and other friends traveled, schemed to improve the lot of man, and wrote great literature. The women bore children almost continually. The adventure ended when Shelley drowned, the friends dispersed, and Mary returned to England. She spent the next 30 years writing and working to build the reputation of her husband.
Although Mary Shelley’s life was fascinating, this is not the place to learn about it. The author states clearly that he is writing a literary life, and his narrative pauses frequently for a discussion of how Mary transformed a particular episode into fiction. There are extensive summaries of her work, along with speculations as to how each reflects the era, the various literary genres, or Mary’s personal crises. Although this works as literary criticism, readers purely interested in biography should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-22832-5
Page Count: 222
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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