A beautifully written life of India's once-famous Nobel laureate who is now largely unknown to Western readers. In the first half of the 20th century, Rabindranath Tagore (18611941) was widely known in the West as a mediator between Eastern and Western culture. His poems, plays, paintings, and music remain enormously influential in India, especially in Bengal. Dutta, a Calcutta-born teacher now living in England, and Robinson, literary editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, assume that Western readers need a complete reintroduction to Tagore. The result is a leisurely, life-and-times biography written from a detached, objective point of view and full of useful explanatory detail. Dutta and Robinson balance the cultural, political, family, and religious influences on Tagore without settling on any one as predominant. Because Tagore participated in so many aspects of Indian politics and literary culture, and knew so many key figures not only in India but in the West, his biography serves as an introduction to basic features of modern Indian history and culture. Although usually deferential to his point of view, the authors are also sensitive to Tagore's contradictions. A beneficiary of British rule, he agonized over the plight of peasants on his family estates but never questioned the legitimacy of private ownership. He supported British rule until the national movement made it unfashionable. After embracing nationalism, he distanced himself, not only from violent extremists, but from political mainstreamers such as Gandhi. The book becomes livelier when the authors lose patience with Tagore, particularly over his hypocrisy in advocating rights for women that he never extended to the women of his own family. As many-sided as Tagore himself, this biography will introduce readers not only to one of the giants of 20th-century literature, but also to the encounter between European and South Asian culture under colonial rule. (48 pages photos)
Pub Date: Dec. 4, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-14030-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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