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AUSTEN YEARS

Name: AUSTEN YEARS
Author: Rachel Cohen
ISBN: 978-0-374-10703-1

A MEMOIR IN FIVE NOVELS

by Rachel Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2020

A nuanced portrait of a writer and reader.

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How Jane Austen’s novels can guide readers through joy and grief.

“Criticism and memoir have always been near neighbors,” writes essayist and biographer Cohen (Creative Writing/Univ. of Chicago; Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, 2013, etc.); “the gift of a pronounced personal point of view leads to deeper readings, and to new ones.” In a thoughtful meditation on the interweaving of literature and life, Cohen recounts her reading during years when her life altered dramatically: Her father died, she married, and her two children were born. Those profound experiences made her vibrantly alert to Austen’s themes: “families and friendships and changing history, how we go back over what we have lived, and whether we can hand it on.” Although Austen never married or had children, she “did not forget that her books would be read in rooms where babies had just been born, and where parents had breathed their last.” Rooms, and the objects within them, reverberated with memories and life. Cohen brings to her analysis a thorough familiarity not only with Austen’s unforgettable characters, but also with her critics and biographers, including the “restrained but insightful” memoir written by Austen’s nephew. These works help her to contextualize the novels, which she analyzes with astute sensitivity. Austen’s characters, in fact, emerge more vividly than many individuals from Cohen’s own life. Except for her father, a kind, imaginative man “full of wit” and generosity, others remain shadowy: her mother, a theater director and teacher; Cohen’s husband—their convoluted 15-year courtship, a friend remarked, seemed “very Jane Austen”; her sister, son, and daughter. Cohen’s father was a professor whose research focused on organizations “and the ways people work and play together.” The author remembers him laughing “with delight and with surprise,” and she portrays the family’s home as “a place of tenderness”—though it was not without mysteries (her father’s sudden decision to give all their books away, for example) that, along with treasured memories, came to shape her reading.

A nuanced portrait of a writer and reader.

Pub Date: July 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-374-10703-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.