Way too much information on the love life, but an essential resource for coming to terms with a key figure in the Auden...
A life of writer/memoirist Isherwood that emulates its subject’s detachment but hardly his conciseness.
Best known for Berlin Stories, the basis for the Broadway play I Am a Camera and for the even more successful musical Cabaret, Isherwood (1904–86) deserves recognition for a wider body of work, argues Parker, a British historian and biographer (The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos, not reviewed). Scion of landed gentry and son of a soldier killed in WWI, Isherwood, in early adulthood, embraced left-wing politics, pacifism, atheism, and homosexuality. In the 1930s, he achieved fame as arguably England’s most promising novelist and as collaborator with ex-schoolmate and sometime lover W.H. Auden on the plays The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6. His life later included a controversial move to America, with Auden, in 1939; a surprising conversion to Hinduism and brief commitment as a monk in the 1940s; thirty years as a Hollywood screenwriter; and lionization as “favorite uncle” to the post-Stonewall generation of gay authors that included Armistead Maupin and Edmund White. Access to Isherwood’s longtime companion Don Bechardy and friend Stephen Spender, as well as to the novelist’s astonishing collection of diaries and letters, enables Parker to pull back the curtain on a writer who on the surface was utterly candid. Charming, witty, and generous, Isherwood could also be narcissistic, bossy, drunken, and, most shockingly, anti-Semitic. Parker points to memoirs, further, that not only altered details but also faked or censored diary entries. Unfortunately, although he has bravely plunged into the forest of Isherwood documentation, Parker sometimes loses his way through sheer inclusiveness, citing his subject’s every quarrel and patch-up with his widowed mother, troubled brother, and lovers (an estimated 400 by age 44).
Way too much information on the love life, but an essential resource for coming to terms with a key figure in the Auden circle. (16-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6249-7
Page Count: 1024
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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
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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