Blackwood comes across as a breath of fresh—if bizarre and spooky—air, an unfettered character that Ashley captures well but...
British Mammoth anthologist Ashley (The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, p. 1252, etc.) resurrects the wildly creative Algernon Blackwood, a master of dread and the spine-shudder.
Now forgotten, Blackwood (1869–1952) was roundly hailed in his day as a genius of horror and supernatural fiction. Ashley brings him back to prominence by giving close and intelligent readings of his work, focusing on such classic stories as “The Wendigo,” “The Willows,” and “The Man Whom the Trees Loved.” Much of that work was produced on the fly while Blackwood, an incessant traveler, was traipsing around Europe, America, and Canada. Ashley follows in his footsteps, exploring the gradual unfurling of Blackwood's communion with nature, his exploration of haunted houses, his fascination with esoteric beliefs. Blackwood’s associates at any given time, Ashley suggests, had a fascinating impact on what he was writing. His sense of the wider world can be gleaned from his dealings with various theosophical societies and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a group intrigued by Western hermeticism, Hebrew magic, and the Kabbala, introduced to him by W.B. Yeats. Ashley also conveys Blackwood’s perception of how his stories acted on the imagination with well-chosen quotes: “My idea,” the author declared in 1915, “has been to describe the sense of Wonder which, beginning with Fancy, leads on to bigger wonder which is Spiritual; and, incidentally, to show the wonder of common things.” Though his work was never a great success in the theater, radio and television were natural venues for Blackwood, whose bass voice worked wonders with the often macabre and always otherworldly nature of his stories.
Blackwood comes across as a breath of fresh—if bizarre and spooky—air, an unfettered character that Ashley captures well but thankfully doesn't tether.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0928-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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