A fine biography that leaves few leaves unturned, and that should revive interest in Koestler’s work.
The first major biography in a quarter-century of Arthur Koestler (1905–83), today best known for the anti-Soviet novel Darkness at Noon (1940).
Scammell (Writing/Columbia Univ.; Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 1984), translator of Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy, among others, has a handful of a subject in Koestler, who roamed continents and disciplines and gave new dimensions to the term “intellectual outlaw.” He was “Hungarian in his temper, German in his industry, Jewish in his intellectual ambition…[and] never comfortable in his own skin, doomed to oscillate between arrogance and humility.” Zelig-like, Koestler was everywhere at once, it seemed, throughout the most important episodes of the 20th century. He interviewed Sigmund Freud, carried documents that implicated the Nazis in the collapse of Republican Spain, hung out with Timothy Leary and Wernher von Braun, palled around with terrorists and Hollywood screenwriters and was known to Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini. Amid all that, he found time to write a half-dozen novels, countless articles and other books, growing improbably more prolific as he grew older. Scammell is more admiring of Koestler than other biographers (such as Iain Hamilton), who have ranked him as a middling novelist and willfully ignorant pop scientist. Yet Scammell somewhat wearily writes, after recounting Koestler’s championing of the Israeli magician/charlatan Uri Geller, “he pursued the grail of proving extrasensory perception to the end of his life, regardless of what the majority of his contemporaries (and his public) thought.” In this elegant biography, Scammell shows a troubled and sometimes troubling soul with an almost stereotypically meddlesome mother—“Don’t you have even a single nice memory of your childhood and youth?” she once demanded of him—and plenty of demons, susceptible to quack theories and big ideas. But he also generated big ideas for their own sake, led the life of the independent intellectual to the hilt and essentially lived as he wished.
A fine biography that leaves few leaves unturned, and that should revive interest in Koestler’s work.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-394-57630-5
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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