The professional successes and personal failures of two of the 20th century’s most prominent and influential journalists.
Although Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) and Rebecca West (1892–1983) knew each for more than 40 years, Hertog (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1999) has more on her mind than their friendship. She’s not even all that interested in their careers, which would have been considered extraordinary under any circumstances but were particularly remarkable for women born duringthe Edwardian era. Thompson, the first female head of a news bureau, was one of the earliest journalists to sound the warning against Hitler’s megalomaniacal plans and remained a respected and influential figure through the end of World War II. West was a feared book critic and essayist who set new standards for long-form journalism with her New Yorker reports on the Nuremberg trials and a lynching case in Greenville, S.C., as well as her esteemed book on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These achievements get almost as much attention as West’s tortured affair with H.G. Wells, which produced an embittered-for-life son, Anthony West, and Thompson’s tortured marriage to Sinclair Lewis, which produced an embittered-for-life son, Michael Lewis. In Hertog’s view, “neither Rebecca nor Dorothy knew how to be a woman,” and though she is careful to preface this judgment with the qualifier, “within their contemporary gender stereotypes,” a queasy mix of feminist jargon and women’s-magazine psychologizing can’t disguise the author’s punitive attitude toward these admittedly less-than-perfect wives and dreadful mothers. Their impact on the political and cultural discourse of their times is far more important than their inadequacies as human beings, but Hertog fails to provide a balanced perspective. Pretentious and poorly written, this irritating joint biography squanders a great subject.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-45986-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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