Proust is less the subject of Rose's pleasurable, rambling memoir than its guiding spirit, whose wisdom and worldview Rose invokes as she reviews the travails and satisfactions of a year in her life. A row with her Key West landlady involving potted palms and banana treees; hectic preparations for a dinner honoring a mystery guest (who turns out to be Salman Rushdie); her friend Annie Dillard's cancer scare; and her own mother's halting progress toward death—these and other events take biographer Rose (Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time, 1989, etc.) into a Proustian blend of social gossip (mostly of literary Key West) and a remembrance of things in her own past. The passing of time, the attempt to transcend it (in collecting antiquities), the need to create something original before it is too late, and the immense difficulty of doing so, are among the novelist's themes that resonate for Rose. Most affecting is her newfound appreciation of the middle-class suburban 1950s childhood she had long reviled: ``I never `understood' my childhood because I never understood what a happy childhood it was.'' This encounter with her past culminates in a visit with her sister to their childhood home for the first time in 36 years. Unlike the fictional Marcel, who returns to Paris after a long absence and finds it much changed, Rose finds the house miraculously preserved, like a museum of her childhood, thus bringing no epiphany but merely the satisfaction of memories confirmed. Still, while there is much to savor here, there are disappointments, an occasional sense of incompleteness; we learn more, for instance, about the social hubbub over her dinner for Rushdie than we do about the writer himself. Perhaps the best part of the book is its opening chapter, in which Rose, having overcome her own inability to penetrate Proust, explains richly how one can do so, and why it is worthwhile.
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83984-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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