Christie lovers will revel in this comprehensive, authoritative book.
A generous and meticulous biography of the legendary crime writer.
In a book originally published in England in 2008 as Agatha Christie: An English Mystery, Somerset Maugham Award winner Thompson (The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, 2016, etc.) offers an affectionate take on the beloved British mystery writer. Thompson calls Agatha Christie (1890-1976) an “entirely private person” who loved to write. As a young girl living a privileged life with servants on the English coast, she published a poem in a local newspaper and never stopped. Her output was prodigious. She wrote her first mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (in which Hercule Poirot—“unreal, unbelievable, yet mysteriously alive”—makes his first appearance) in 1916, after her sister said, “I bet you couldn’t.” After it was published in 1920, Christie published novels, plays, and stories, including the “obviously autobiographical,” pseudonymous Mary Westmacott books, virtually every year. Thompson writes that Christie became a better writer “by degrees. By intelligence; by instinct; by confidence; by courage.” The author is unquestionably a fan of Christie’s works, which she knows intimately, discussing them in a somewhat reverential tone, but she also admits that Christie wasn’t always “at her best.” Christie’s “dazzling” and “elegantly” structured novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) is “exquisite.” Five Little Pigs (1942) is a “masterly piece of writing.” Thompson has a penchant for mixing the biography with the works, quoting extensively from them to help reinforce her discussions of events in Christie’s life. She is excellent with her almost novelistic, day-by-day accounting of Christie’s famous disappearance in 1926 when she was distraught after learning about her first husband’s affair with another woman. She made the reporters covering the story “look silly. Now she would suffer for it.” Thompson admits Christie “probably was something of a snob” and a “writer first, mother second.”
Christie lovers will revel in this comprehensive, authoritative book.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-653-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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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