Potter described her stories as giving “pleasure without ugliness.” The same can be said of this respectful biography.
The life of the prolific children’s author was circumscribed, even by Victorian standards.
With 40 million copies sold since its publication in 1902, The Tale of Peter Rabbit has made Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) world-famous. Dennison (Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, 2015, etc.) draws largely on Potter’s children’s stories, journals, and letters to document her personal and artistic development, resulting in a narrowly focused biography that offers little perspective beyond the subject’s own. Born into a well-to-do British family, Potter’s world “was one of conformities and prohibitions.” Raised in isolation from other children by domineering parents, her youthful companions were her brother and their many beloved pets. By the time she was a teenager, she experienced recurring illnesses and began to think of herself as an invalid. “Whether her parents were responsible for this attitude, or simply sought to manipulate it, is unclear,” Dennison writes. Intent on becoming a botanical illustrator, Potter obsessively honed her skills as an artist and naturalist, interests covered thoroughly in Linda Lear’s recent biography. Her career as a children’s author began accidentally, when she was 27, with letters to the bedridden son of one of her former governesses. She illustrated tales about Peter and three other anthropomorphic rabbits with pen-and-ink drawings that eventually made their way into her books. Her parents tried to manage her life even as she gained professional success. They disapproved of her engagement to the shy son of her publisher, who unfortunately died before they could marry; and they again disapproved when, at the age of 41, Potter accepted another man’s proposal. She defied them and seemed to live happily ever after. Throughout the book, Dennison, jarringly, compares Potter to her cutely named characters: like “Miss Matilda Pussycat,” Potter was “prone to neuralgia”; like “Hunca Munca,” her disappointment sometimes led to anger; like “Jemima Puddle-duck,” she was determined to follow her dreams.
Potter described her stories as giving “pleasure without ugliness.” The same can be said of this respectful biography.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-350-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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