A British journalist's attempt to make an influential but enigmatic Victorian literary figure accessible to a late-20th- century audience. Thomas Carlyle was a problem for the Victorians and has remained puzzling ever since. His abrupt, moralistic style remains as opaque today as it was to contemporary critics. When readers turn to Carlyle, they find many incoherent arguments and others that strongly resemble Nazi ideology. Heffer (deputy editor of London's Daily Telegraph) acknowledges those difficulties and sets out to justify Carlyle by setting him in context. As a straightforward, readable account of his life, Moral Desperado is a success. Heffer manages to convey a sense of how this awkward, ungracious hypochondriac addressed the moral and political anxieties of the world's first industrial nation, beset with urban slums and unprecedented class conflict. When attempting to make sense of Carlyle's often repellent political views, Heffer is much less successful. It is not enough simply to assert that those who object to Carlyle's racist power-worship are failing to put his ideas in context. It was, after all, another famous Victorian, John Stuart Mill, who characterized Carlyle in context as a ``moral desperado.'' Today it is even more difficult to come to terms with a writer whose solution to what he called ``the nigger question'' was whipping. What are we to make of a writer whose works were a favorite of Adolf Hitler? What are we to think of someone who was, by his own admission, horribly cruel to his wife? Heffer does little to answer those questions, and largely ignores the scholars of Victorian literature and culture who have labored to keep Carlyle's reputation alive. In spite of Heffer's rehabilitation, Carlyle remains in his hands as much of a moral desperado today as he was in his Victorian context.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-297-81564-4
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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