A graceful, absorbing meditation on two lives.
A writer discovers herself as she searches to understand Doris Lessing (1919-2013).
In her mid-30s, married with a young son, Feigel (English/King’s Coll., London; The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich, 2016, etc.) became obsessed with the idea of freedom. A miscarriage strained her marriage, and as desperately as she wanted another child, she also felt conflicted about the inherent constraints of motherhood. Struggling to define the “existential feeling” of freedom and its consequences for a woman’s life, Feigel turned to Lessing, for whom liberation was a pressing concern and recurring theme, mining her works and her life in an attempt “to understand freedom as Lessing conceived it and as we might apprehend it now, politically, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually.” Thoroughly immersed in Lessing’s work, Feigel decided that there seemed an “urgent and personal liberation to be found in pursuing Lessing herself: in hunting her down as a way of giving the side of me that identified with her the space and time it needed to emerge.” Combining memoir, biography, and sensitive close readings of Lessing’s fiction and autobiography, Feigel creates an unusually intimate exploration of the intertwining of Lessing’s life with her own. As much as she admired Lessing, two facets of her life were problematic: her abandonment of her two young children, which Lessing saw as “a necessary condition” of her pursuit of freedom; and her continued membership in the Communist Party. Lessing’s “love affair with communism,” Feigel writes, “left me both envious and shocked”: shocked by her attempts to defend Stalin; envious of the reckless excitement of a love affair as well as “her determination to be always complicated: to question everything—not only what those around her thought, but what she herself thought.” Despite all of Lessing’s “energy and talent,” her life inevitably “narrowed” in ways she could not control, leading Feigel to redefine freedom for herself as a “surprisingly joyful knowledge of my own powerlessness.”
A graceful, absorbing meditation on two lives.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-095-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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