A vast subject confined in a small but well-illuminated room.
The story of life stories, from cave paintings and Gilgamesh to Michael Holroyd and James Frey.
Hamilton may be the best friend biography has ever had. A skilled laborer in the life-story vineyard (Bill Clinton, 2003, etc.), he is also a fierce advocate for the importance of the genre—with some axes to grind. He wonders why the University of Hawaii at Manoa is the only one in the world with a department devoted to the study of biography. He rails against the OED, which he claims has insisted on limiting the definition of biography to written accounts only. Hamilton’s much broader category includes portraits, sculpture, painting, plays, films, TV shows, comic books and much of popular culture. Although he does pause periodically to discuss unconventional forms (Shakespeare’s dramatic studies of kings, for example), he focuses primarily on traditional biographies. Hamilton believes biography serves significant cultural functions. It is a way we learn about the past and (in the West at least) celebrate the primacy of the individual. His text hopscotches through history, staying put now and then to discuss great moments in biography and autobiography: the Gospels, St. Augustine, Plutarch, Raleigh, Rousseau, Boswell, Freud, Strachey and Woolf, who wrote Orlando because she decided that “if print biography could not batter down the doors of English decorum . . . it would have to mask itself as fiction.” Hamilton declares Citizen Kane the most powerful of all biographies, even though fictionalized. He looks hard at forces that oppose the biographer—religion, tradition, prudishness, libel laws, totalitarianism—and casts particular opprobrium on copyright laws that keep permission to publish in the hands of a subject’s surviving relatives. (He does not mention his own struggles with the Kennedys after the 1992 publication of JFK: Reckless Youth.) The author believes that democracy has been the propellant for biography’s rocket-like rise in the last half-century . . . and for biographers’ newfound freedom to write about their subjects’ sex lives. Many illuminating excerpts illustrate the text.
A vast subject confined in a small but well-illuminated room.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-674-02466-4
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
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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