Many empty calories in this airy confection. (16 pages b&w photographs, not seen)
In prose so light that sentences nearly float up from the page, Lovell (A Rage to Live, 1998, etc.) chases the Mitford sisters (Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah) hither and yon, from mansion to prison, from Hitler’s hideaway to the top of the bestseller lists.
Lovell declares that she had originally intended a sort of “frothy biography” but instead found so many conflicts, passions, and personal tragedies that the story darkened. Not really. Although there are indeed numerous family crises and catastrophes (unexpected deaths—one of Jessica’s children, a ten-year-old, was delivering newspapers when he was struck and killed by a bus—infidelities, and financial reversals), the story always rolls merrily along with little trenchant or compelling analysis of the meanings or effects of the events. So much froth remains. Still, the much-chronicled Mitfords remain a family with astonishing histories. Diana and Unity were infatuated with fascism and charmed by Hitler (Lovell does not believe they ended up in the sack). Unity, in fact, was so alarmed when England and Germany went to war that she shot herself in the head, somehow survived, and, in Lovell’s words, “remained childlike for the rest of her life.” (Hitler, ever accommodating, paid all her medical bills and saw that she got safely to Switzerland.) Back in England, Diana, whom the government considered a security threat, sat out three and a half years of the war in prison. Lovell can manage only the obvious: “This was the nadir of Diana’s life.” Jessica—denied an education by her parents (who saw no point in it for young women)—rebelled by becoming a Communist and later emigrated to America, where, after becoming a citizen, she found herself being grilled by the California Un-American Activities Committee. Lovell does not do justice to the Mitfords’ impressive, varied writing careers, often contenting herself with providing the titles and a jacket-flap kind of summary.
Many empty calories in this airy confection. (16 pages b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-01043-0
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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