A rich, urbane, insightful collection.
Masterful essays from an award-winning fiction writer.
Assessing the novels of Barbara Pym, Hazzard (The Great Fire, 2003, etc.) writes, “her candid, penetrating humanity can be disconcerting, like a quiet, strong, perceiving presence in a busy room.” Much the same can be said of Hazzard’s exquisitely crafted essays, which radiate with shrewd wisdom and intelligence. Of the pieces collected here, only three, lectures she delivered in Princeton’s Gauss Seminar series, have not been previously published in periodicals or as contributions to books. Editor Olubas (English/Univ. of New South Wales; Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist, 2012, etc.) notes that Hazzard sees nonfiction as “something of a distraction…from her primary labor.” But the same qualities acclaimed in her fiction are evident here: acute attention to language and a passionate commitment to fostering “the private bond, the immortal intimacy” between reader and writer. Among many fine pieces are an elegy to her mentor William Maxwell, who first published her stories in the New Yorker and became a cherished friend; her praise of Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick White for work that celebrates “the bloom of a bound humanity”; and five uncompromising critiques of the United Nations, where Hazzard worked in the 1950s. Characterizing the U.N. as a useless body of frightened men, she calls for reforming the “corrupt political basis” endemic in the organization, singling out former Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim for his disastrous record on human rights. One autobiographical essay stands out for its gentle, telling revelations of the author at 16—naïve and craving adventure—living with her parents in Hong Kong, where her need for “an occupation” was fulfilled by a mundane job in a government office. Sent on an assignment to Canton, she recalls the alien “contours of Eastern lands, those landscapes that have never heard of Romanticism or Impressionism.”
A rich, urbane, insightful collection.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17326-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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