A somber, important complement to Charles C. Calhoun’s vibrant Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (see above).
Historian McFarland (The Brave Bostonians, 1998, etc.) paints a selective, complex, and ultimately enriching portrait of America's earliest psychological novelist in his middle years.
The narrative follows Hawthorne during nonconsecutive years over the last three decades of his life in Concord, Massachusetts. There he joined a community of such progressive kindred spirits as Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Hawthorne, born in Salem and educated at Bowdoin College (Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce were classmates), found an affordable manse there at the urging of Emerson in the summer of 1842, when the 38-year-old author of a short-story collection (Twice-Told Tales) was newly, ecstatically married to Sophia Peabody. Now Hawthorne could finally settle down to some serious writing, thus putting an end to the paralyzing, gloomy solitude of his earlier years. But it would take seven years more and penurious exile from Concord before he would return in triumph, having published The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, to inhabit Concord more or less for good. Politics intervened in 1852, in the form of the incendiary Uncle Tom's Cabin (published a few weeks before Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance), the Fugitive Slave Act, and the election of Pierce to the presidency. The impecunious Hawthorne agreed to write a biography of Pierce, then served four years as US consul to Liverpool. As the Civil War erupted and Pierce was vilified for his Southern sympathies, Hawthorne was excoriated for his loyalty. He remains an enigmatic writer, drawn to the dark, fatal forces of the human psyche (appreciated even in those pre-Freudian days), as McFarland amply illustrates in his own sometimes turgid prose. The biography’s defining premise requires jumping around and backtracking, though McFarland provides excellent historical context to solidify the gaps. Relish the rich portraits of Margaret Fuller, Horace Mann (married to one of Sophia’s sisters), and publisher/travel companion William Ticknor.
A somber, important complement to Charles C. Calhoun’s vibrant Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (see above).Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1776-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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