Among the best of the many books about the notorious Mitfords: sympathetic but shrewd, warmly appreciative of Nancy’s...
A life story nearly as witty and provocative as the English author’s delicious novels and own biographies.
British journalist Thompson (The Dogs, 1995) takes a refreshingly personal and opinionated approach to Nancy Mitford (1904–73), making a nice contrast with Selina Hastings’s serviceable but flat 1985 portrait. Thompson’s breezy but stylish prose perfectly suits her subject, a woman who loved clever people, fashionable clothes, and a good laugh. She expertly assesses the tangled emotional dynamics of the aristocratic but impoverished Mitfords, growing up in rural isolation as six charismatic girls and their brother were left to run wild by their eccentric parents. Nancy was the oldest, a “black-haired green-eyed changeling” given to rather nasty teasing of her beautiful blonde sisters, “restless and relentless in her search for laughter . . . the spark that set that family crackling with vitality.” She made a disastrous marriage and wrote four agreeable but slight novels before finding her literary voice—direct, simple, wildly funny yet cognizant of human frailty—in The Pursuit of Love, a 1945 comic masterpiece starring her flamboyant kin. The book was Nancy’s defiantly gay rejoinder to the grim war years; in her substantive but selective text, the author assumes readers know the basic facts about the three Nazi-sympathizing Mitford siblings (Unity, Tom, and Diana, wife of Oswald Mosley) and concentrates on their sister’s reaction to them. In 1946, Nancy moved to Paris, her home for the best years of her life, during which she enchanted readers with three further novels (notably Love in a Cold Climate) and four popular biographies (including Madame de Pompadour). Her enduring love for Gaullist politician Gaston Palewski was not matched by fidelity on his side, but Thompson’s astute analysis of their relationship does not scant the joy it gave her along with much sorrow. And Nancy would always strive to be cheerful, even when slowly dying in excruciating pain.
Among the best of the many books about the notorious Mitfords: sympathetic but shrewd, warmly appreciative of Nancy’s ability to snatch happiness from even the most tragic circumstances.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7472-4575-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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