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SIEGFRIED SASSOON

Name: SIEGFRIED SASSOON
Author: Max Egremont
ISBN: 0-374-26375-2

A LIFE

by Max Egremont ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2005

Thoughtful and well-paced—an illuminating study of the fine but now overlooked poet.

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Lucid biography of the eminent English poet, forever on the outside and never quite at home in his own time.

Egremont (Balfour, not reviewed) agrees with Ronald Knox that Siegfried Sassoon was “predominantly ‘a First War man,’ ” profoundly shaped by his experiences in the trenches of France and Belgium. Sassoon was wounded in battle but did not die, unlike his friend Wilfred Owen, who came to be considered the great English poet of the Great War. Sassoon grumbled about this, ungallantly; annoyed that an American anthology of WWI verse had more of Owen’s poems than of his, Sassoon wrote to Edmund Blunden that “the canonisation of Wilfred is still in full swing.” Sassoon was used to feeling snubbed; he was Jewish and gay at a time when British society had little tolerance for such things. As a teenager, he “wanted to conform and from this came affection, sometimes love, for a type he was drawn to all his life: the man of character, not intellect.” So it was for most of his life, though in the late 1920s Sassoon was drawn into the preppy social circle surrounding the wealthy aesthete Stephen Tennant, the so-called Bright Young Thing who provided Evelyn Waugh with satirical ammunition for his early novels. Sassoon was deeply in love with Tennant, but the relationship was turbulent, and in 1933 he married a woman named Hester Gatty. The marriage was not successful, and Sassoon soon “began to loathe her often reasonable demands for love and closeness”; now even more conflicted, he grew withdrawn, conservative and even puritanical, a champion of good-old-days England, old-fashioned in his own time and ever less popular with contemporary readers. His death certificate referred to him as “poet and author retired,” while others remembered him as a “desperately conventional man” who could never be as free as he wished.

Thoughtful and well-paced—an illuminating study of the fine but now overlooked poet.

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2005

ISBN: 0-374-26375-2

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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FORGOTTEN LAND
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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.