A lively, vigorously written biography of a singular character that beckons readers urgently back to Sackville-West’s...
A passionately delineated portrait of the savage writer, fiercely private lover of women, and eccentric denizen of Sissinghurst.
There are many moments in this breathless biography of Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) when British journalist and biographer Dennison (The Twelve Caesars: The Dramatic Lives of the Emperors of Rome, 2013, etc.) is so caught up in his narrative that he neglects to fill in the blanks for readers unfamiliar with his enigmatic subject, the British novelist and poet known mostly for her ardor for Virginia Woolf and as a gardener at Sissinghurst later in life. Nonetheless, on the whole, the author ably illuminates the life of his fiery subject. She was a creature of the ancient aristocratic order who pined forever for the loss of the Sackville ancestral home, Knole House, in Kent, which her profligate mother, Victoria, nearly lost in 1912 due to its massive financial drain but which essentially passed by inheritance laws to the nearest male heir. Growing up in Knole shaped Vita’s extravagant, secretive persona, and Dennison constantly returns to her duality of nature, male and female, that she would try to resolve in her writing. An only child to her overbearing mother, she adored playing dramatic roles, cross-dressing, and wearing masks. The two great loves of her life allowed her to indulge her passion for concealment: her homosexual diplomat husband, Harold Nicholson, and the relentless lover of her mid-20s, Violet Keppel, who christened Vita “Mitya” or “Julian” as they danced scandalously across Europe. Dennison downplays Vita’s relationship with Woolf as a smoldering and significant writerly friendship. His narrative is utterly absorbing in its attention to the minutiae of property, inheritance, houses, clothing, and letters. All the while, the author extracts from Vita’s writing rich autobiographical detail.
A lively, vigorously written biography of a singular character that beckons readers urgently back to Sackville-West’s writing.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-03394-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
PROFILES
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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