An idiosyncratic but morally serious autobiography from noted British novelist and biographer Mosley (Hopeful Monsters, 1991, etc.) that is more a search for meaning in both life and art than a conventional rÇsumÇ of milestones. Mosley claims he wrote the book ``to see the partnership between learning and life, between experience and what is made of life, to see that one never gets to the end of unveiling smokescreens and presuppositions but it is in this attempt that there is a validity of being human.'' His childhood was, to say the least, unusual: His mother, daughter of Raj Viceroy Lord Curzon and an American heiress, died when he was nine, and his father, the notorious British fascist leader, was imprisoned during WW II; but the autobiographer is more intent on fulfilling his promised intellectual agenda. He begins with his youthful, idealistic first marriage in 1947, which also marks the start of his literary life as he writes novels first in the Caribbean, then in Wales, and finally in their country home near London. The couple was independently wealthy, and this lack of financial cares perhaps increased the sense of isolation from the mundane that characterizes Mosley's life and writing. He describes with agonizing scrupulousness his writing projects, his troubling but irresistible infidelities, his religious quest, and his estrangement from and subsequent reconciliation with his father. By middle age he had moved on from formal religion to psychoanalysis and a preoccupation with the patterns that lurk behind the ``smokescreens of [his] memory and verbiage''—ideas that would further evolve in his recent Catastrophe novels. He ends in the present, certain ``that if one trusts, then things may indeed work out in proper, if mysterious, ways.'' Quirky and at times tedious in exposition, but always honest and intellectually provocative. An autobiography that unflinchingly bares both the heart and the soul.
Pub Date: June 3, 1995
ISBN: 1-56478-075-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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