The biographer of Nietzsche, Kafka, Brecht, Sartre, Proust and de Sade takes on Tennessee Williams with intelligent, neatly weighed but uninspired results. Hayman mentions that he was commissioned by Yale to write this book, which otherwise might never have been written. Since very little original research has gone into it—it's mostly a too-smooth reshuffling of already familiar stuff—a reader of earlier lives of Williams might wonder why anyone should pursue this one. Still, Hayman's weighing of his subject's life brings a lively, not overly academic sensibility to bear on work a new generation might not be familiar with and offers as well a history of productions of Williams plays that often had his wavering imprimatur. The tack Hayman takes boils down to a portrait of a bedeviled gay artist whose growing dependence on drugs reinforced a neurotic insecurity that could be borne only by the immense daily discipline of writing—and writing no matter what disaster has befallen him. Williams's last 20 years come off as a decline into mental slop, with the playwright doggedly dramatizing his own ``blue devils'' without effect and producing failure upon failure, or parody upon self-parody. Meanwhile, he also falls into outrageous behavior and talks endlessly like a queen bitch who wants only to be stroked, despite whatever idiocies he's mouthing. A thought played on by Elia Kazan when first mounting A Streetcar Named Desire seems pivotal to understanding Williams, who as a younger man often picked up rough trade and was sometimes beaten up, a fear that becomes central to the Blanche-Stanley polarity, with Williams as Blanche and Stanley the rough trade perhaps out to murder him. In the end, Williams lusted for new acclaim by the critics as if for a lost Mardi Gras crown. Spankingly well-produced with superb illustrations.
Pub Date: March 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-05414-9
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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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