A thorough, engaging, and even loving restoration of a woman writer whose story needed to be told and whose works required...
A scholarly, riveting life of an English poet and novelist whose precocious career ended in sexual scandal and controversy about her sudden death.
Literary critic Miller (The Brontë Myth, 2004), the founding editorial director of independent British publisher Notting Hill Editions, successfully returns to public awareness the astonishing (and brief) career and achievements of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), who, for a time, seemed to create poems as easily as she breathed. However, her personal life—scandalous to the emerging Victorians—sent her stock plummeting, and she died in West Africa of causes whose mysteries Miller does much to dispel. The author begins with Landon’s death, provides a quick sketch of her initial popularity, and then returns to a fairly strict chronology. Miller describes her subject’s background and her long association and sexual relationship with her married mentor, William Jerdan, editor at the time of the Literary Gazette. Jerdan promoted her career—and sired her three children, none of whom remained in her care, or his. For a while, L.E.L., as she signed her pieces, was a literary sensation, and Miller places her as sort of a transitional figure between the Romantics (Shelley, Byron et al.) and the Victorians. The text, in fact, is populated heavily with literary heavyweights, including Dickens, the Brontës, Poe, Woolf, and numerous others. The extent of Miller’s research is impressive and includes her visit to the scene of Landon’s death. The author seems to have read everything even marginally relevant, and she maintains a strong auctorial presence, noting—bluntly and accurately—the era’s male literary dominance and the grotesque double standard of private behavior. Libidinous men suffered few consequences: Jerdan himself moved on to another teenager after he tired of Landon.
A thorough, engaging, and even loving restoration of a woman writer whose story needed to be told and whose works required fresh, attentive eyes.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-375-41278-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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