A generous, mostly gratifying life, but a question remains: What drove this deeply committed author?
Scottish chronicler Gibb (Lady Hester: Queen of the East, 2005) presents Rebecca West (1892–1983) in all her contradictory melodrama, unflinching political vision and trailblazing feminism.
However, there is a frustrating lack of depth regarding the context of West's writing and a great deal about her personal shenanigans and relations with her son and her lovers. A British journalist of the finest caliber, who gave us prescient, shimmering dispatches from Yugoslavia (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1941), the Nuremberg trials and others, West was also so virulently anti-communist that she wrote sympathetic articles about Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigations and was roundly excoriated for it. Born Cicely Isabel Fairfield to an Irish father who more or less abandoned the family of three daughters, leaving his capable, educated and musical wife to settle in her native Edinburgh, the young protagonist fell in early with the cause of the suffragettes and failed in her first career as an actress. As a firebrand journalist—she quickly grasped the necessity of changing her pen name when her mother complained about her feminist causes, and she thereby used as nom de plume a character from Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm—West caught the eye of the philandering novelist H.G. Wells, who was older and married. Their scandalous love affair produced a son, Anthony, and it is difficult to tell from Gibb’s account who exactly was to blame for the lifelong animosity between mother and son. In any case, extraordinarily versatile in her work, West wrote both a critical biography of Henry James and numerous novels, beginning with her debut, The Return of the Soldier (1918). During her long life, West was acquainted or worked with many of the most notable figures from her age, from Emma Goldman to Roberto Rossellini to Warren Beatty.
A generous, mostly gratifying life, but a question remains: What drove this deeply committed author?Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-306-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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