A solid, if not fully revealing, biography.
The life of a venerated, enigmatic poet.
In 1943, after Marianne Moore first met Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) at a literary conference, she remarked to William Carlos Williams that Stevens “is beyond fathoming.” He was “so strange,” she added, “as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose….” That secret remains hidden even in this well-researched life by veteran biographer Mariani (English/Boston Coll.; Gerard Manley Hopkins, 2008, etc.), who mines Stevens’ correspondence, lectures, and poetry to chronicle his personal and aesthetic evolution. Aspiring to be a poet, Stevens nevertheless acquiesced to his father’s advice to train as a lawyer; after failing to get a permanent position in a legal firm, at the age of 29 he took a job in the insurance business, which, “given his personality and the difficulties he had working with people,” proved a better fit than a law career. The following year, after five years of courtship and despite his father’s vehement opposition, he married Elsie Kachel. He would come to decide his father was right: Mariani portrays Elsie as shy, possibly agoraphobic, and, as Stevens saw her, cold and spiteful. The poet spent much time on the road for work, often extending business trips to frolic with friends; at home, the couple did not share a bedroom. Mariani does not reveal affairs, but he quotes Stevens extolling “Cuban señoritas” in Florida. Stevens’ early poetry, marked often by “comfortable tranquility,” obscured the poet’s ferocity, “the angry man, the raging bull piqued by the picador.” One business associate expressed sympathy for his daughter, “her father being what he was.” Stevens, acutely sensitive to critics, found easy publication in literary magazines and with book publishers. Praised by such influential poets as Williams and Moore, he won accolades, prestigious awards, and honorary degrees, and his reputation has grown since his death in 1955. Though Mariani delivers plenty of biographical details, he doesn’t entirely open up his subject’s “brilliant, funny, haunting, musical, dark, and often consoling world.”
A solid, if not fully revealing, biography.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2437-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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