An intriguing look at a particularly influential life of letters and a treat for Mailer fans.
The late literary lion’s archivist shares 70 years of his missives.
Before he died at age 84, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Norman Mailer (1923-2007) penned 44 books. He also spent that time adapting plays, writing poetry, producing films, and helping to launch “New Journalism” and the Village Voice. In the course of all that activity, the Brooklyn boy–turned–Harvard man also wrote complex, caustic and sometimes-moving letters to some 4,000 individuals. Lennon (Norman Mailer: A Double Life, 2013) presents 716 of those letters, decade by decade, in their naked forms and without much introduction. The recipients represent a cavalcade of contrasting personalities ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to Monica Lewinsky. Most are directed at Mailer’s family, friends and colleagues and find the World War II veteran supremely absorbed in his own ideas. Mailer aficionados will no doubt enjoy the behind-the-scenes looks at the making of seminal works like The Naked and the Dead, as well as the writer’s ongoing sparring matches with editors and critics. Back in 1958, fellow scribe William Styron received this warning: “So I tell you this, Bill-boy. You have got to learn to keep your mouth shut about my wife, for if you do not, and I hear of it again, I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.” The legendary man of letters seems downright tame here, possessed of a certain kind of blue-collar charm that compliments his penchant for intellectualization. But one must also then consider that Mailer later stabbed the same woman he so steadfastly defended. She survived, but the author would go on to fulfill the prediction he made early on in life about becoming a serial groom. Apparently, Mailer hated writing letters and often found the exercise tortuous, but from Lennon’s collection, it appears that he loathed being disconnected even more.
An intriguing look at a particularly influential life of letters and a treat for Mailer fans.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6623-0
Page Count: 860
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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