Callow makes us wish we’d been in those crowds to watch this astonishing magician weave his literary spells.
Callow (My Life in Pieces, 2011, etc.) rehearses the life of Dickens with a sharp spotlight on the importance of the theater and of performance both in Dickens’ life and in his fiction.
The author is a front-row fan who has read Dickens’ works repeatedly and whose admiration for his subject glistens on every page. It’s hard not to admire the Dickens appearing here, a man whose Promethean production and energy make Trollope-Updike-Oates look a tad slothful. Writer of serial novels (he was producing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist simultaneously), creator of the most beloved Christmas story outside the Gospels, editor of his own literary magazines, performer of his own works, husband (not an attentive one), father of 10, philanthropist…all in an age when rail travel was a novelty and writers still used that old-fashioned word processor, a pen. Callow generally follows the traditional narrative line of Dickens’ life (with emphasis on his early and never-ending interest in theater), chronicling his time in the blacking factory, his indigent father, his schooling (very little), his rise in the world of letters, his friendships (literary and otherwise) and his enormous, trans-Atlantic celebrity. Callow doesn’t ignore—though he does diminish a bit—Dickens’ very human failures: his long affair with actress Ellen Ternan, his harsh treatment of his wife and his petulance and even pomposity in his dealings with publishers. But Callow’s greatest achievements are his analysis of Dickens’ prodigious thespian skills and his generation of an absolute love affair with his readership. The author shows us the vast, adoring crowds and tallies the enormous psychic and physical costs of Dickens’ myriad performances and celebrity.
Callow makes us wish we’d been in those crowds to watch this astonishing magician weave his literary spells.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-345-80323-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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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