Students of modernist literature and publishing history will find this a pleasure.
A namesake and descendant delivers a richly detailed biography of the distinguished British publishing house.
After World War I, returning veteran Geoffrey Faber found himself relieved from a job for which he didn’t have much talent, running a brewery, and talked his way into a medical publishing house, setting about diversifying the list with a literary magazine, works of fiction, and “legal cram books.” While the last never came about, writes Faber (Faberge's Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire, 2008, etc.), Geoffrey eventually shaped a list dominated by literature, publishing many of the greats. As he wrote to a friend, the company’s new premises on Russell Square provided an incentive “to build up as fine a publishing business as we can to inhabit it!” As the author writes in this documentary biography of the company, Geoffrey was fortunate in taking on the American poet T.S. Eliot, so much an Anglophile as to be more English than the English, as an early editor. Eliot often rejected submissions, but he also encouraged work by poets such as W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, helping make Faber a major presence in the literary world from the 1930s on. At the same time, other editors and directors brought in notable writers such as William Golding, who delivered a manuscript that he called A Cry of Children, soon to be superseded by a Faber editor’s much more memorable Lord of the Flies. The author isn’t shy about sharing the fiscal details of publishing, opening with the old adage that the way to make a small fortune in the business is to start with a large one. He also provides insight into the publishing work of rock legend Pete Townshend, who, despairing of the future of his band, came to work for Faber & Faber in 1983, writing what one colleague called "good old-fashioned publishing reports, very serious, very diligent reports on the books we’re considering.”
Students of modernist literature and publishing history will find this a pleasure.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-5713-3904-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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