A literary biographer with a light, mellifluous touch underscores the precarious position of women in 19th-century English...
A lively story of an aggrieved wife fleeing an impulsive Regency romance, which became a massive scandal in 19th-century England.
Author of previous Victorian biographies and also novels, Markus (English/Hofstra Univ.; J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian, 2005, etc.) finds in Lady Byron a protofeminist wife who refused to be humiliated by the famous, pathological philanderer who scorned her after a year of marriage that produced a child, Ada. The author has scoured the archives for evidence of rich nuance to the life of Lady Byron, nee Annabella Milbanke, English aristocrat and only child to a set of middle-age progressives who recognized and cultivated their daughter’s precocious mathematical bent. Markus tracks how Annabella was manipulated by her influential aunt, Lady Melbourne, into marriage with the famous, unstable poet Lord Byron, who was actually in love with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. Indeed, the crux of the scandal involved the daughter of Augusta Leigh by Byron, Medora, born shortly before his marriage to Annabella. Soon enough, Annabella discovered the sadistic narcissism of her gloomy new husband, who delighted in crushing her will and playing the two women off each other. Markus wades deeply into the legal measures Annabella took (with her ample means) to separate from her abusive husband when divorce was out of the question and also to protect her daughter, Ada, who became a brilliant disciple of scientific savant Charles Babbage. The author portrays the magnanimity of Annabella in sheltering the abused Medora, caught in the familial trauma of her mother (Medora was raped and became a teenage mother), and shows how Lady Byron’s own victimization prompted her philanthropic work, specifically in establishing education opportunities for girls.
A literary biographer with a light, mellifluous touch underscores the precarious position of women in 19th-century English society.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-08268-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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
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
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