Affectionate and intimate, this hefty biography should help Powell find new readers.
An authorized biography of the prolific and underappreciated English writer.
Award-winning biographer and journalist Spurling (Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth, 2010, etc.) writes early on that urbane Anthony Powell (1905-2000), whom she met when she was in her 20s, “made me his biographer long ago.” Her friendship with “Tony” provided her with access to his diaries, letters, and numerous interviews. As the son of a British officer, Powell’s early, itinerant years resulted in an “energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child’s point of view.” Throughout his life, writes Spurling, “human behavior entranced him.” He found a “community that accepted him” at Eton, but his years at Oxford were depressing: “How little I liked being” there, he said. Powell’s friendship with fellow student Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green) led to their reading together Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and their realization that the “novel as they knew it could never be the same again.” After graduating, Powell secured an apprentice publisher’s job at Duckworths. “Nothing taught him more about the technical side of writing” than hours spent reading unsolicited manuscripts. He met authors and artists and attended parties, all the time observing. Spurling’s account of this English publishing world is delightful. Powell decided that his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), would be an “urban pastoral,” which Spurling describes as a “dry run” for his later masterwork, A Dance to the Music of Time, a panoramic series of 12 volumes written over 25 years. As a novelist, writes the author, “his imagination remained to the end essentially pictorial.” Readers will enjoy Spurling’s descriptions of Powell’s literary friendships with, among others, Evelyn Waugh, the Sitwells, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, and V.S. Naipaul; less so, her numerous, detailed descriptions of dinner parties.
Affectionate and intimate, this hefty biography should help Powell find new readers.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52134-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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