This new offering in the expanding and increasingly noteworthy field of Chekhov studies lacks both the original scholarship and the intellectual depth of other recent studies. Callow (From Noon to Starry Night, 1992; Lost Earth, 1995) has made a career of writing biographies of artistic greats, from CÇzanne to Walt Whitman. Turning his attention to a writer clearly dear to his heart, he opens his study with sentimental musings on seeing his first performance of a Chekhov work at the age of 22. This opening immediately sets the tone for a biography that takes us on a bumpy and highly personal journey through Chekhov’s life and work. Callow covers the usual ground: Chekhov’s youth in Taganrog, his move to Moscow, medical school, family affairs, the writing life, and his marriage to the actress Olga Knipper. He also interweaves mostly tedious commentary on and synopses of individual stories and plays into the narrative, and includes extended excerpts from Chekhov’s texts and letters. Callow’s narrative, from the very start, lacks structure (for instance, his information about serfdom in Russia is never given a proper context or carried through to form an argument) and tends to wander in too many directions. Furthermore, his staccato style (“he” can be repeated a dozen times in as many sentences) becomes irritating. As suggested by the biography’s subtitle, Callow’s loosely defined central interest in Chekhov is the “hidden,— or emotional, life of the author and the recurrent themes of romantic disillusionment and the search for intimacy that appear in Chekhov’s plays and short stories. But these are subjects that have long interested scholars and literary critics, and have generated considerable interesting work. Callow’s overly simplistic biography fails to convey the source of Chekhov’s genius. Interested readers would benefit more from their own reading of Chekhov, or from the more stimulating biographies of Donald Rayfield or V.S. Pritchett. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 15, 1998
ISBN: 1-56663-187-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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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