by Jeffrey Meyers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 20, 2004
A major biography, then, of a minor figure.
A well-considered life of the phenomenally successful but little esteemed English writer.
Pity poor W. Somerset Maugham, whose friends called him “Willie”: he complained that his manicured Riviera villa and yacht were poor places to write, “out of touch with the stream of life, with people, with happenings of import.” When he entered into that stream, he sometimes got himself into deep trouble, but also turned up material for stories that approached literature—Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge. Having achieved success early on with books that critics dismissed as potboilers, Maugham found himself outside the best literary circles; he lived to be a ripe 92, but “he developed no coterie and was sustained by no reliable faction,” and was indeed most unpopular. Literary and film biographer Meyers (Inherited Risk, 2002, etc.) enumerates the reasons for Maugham’s poor standing: he had a “chilling character,” lived abroad to avoid paying British taxes, was openly homosexual, and “enjoyed writing and composed with great facility in an age when highly admired authors, like Joyce and Kafka, tortured themselves with creative agony.” The last reason seems a little unlikely; like Stephen King and the National Book Award, after all, Maugham got his honors and his moolah too, a million dollars for the play Rain and its subsequent adaptations alone. But it finds echoes in critical assessments of the time, which accused Maugham of emotional tone-deafness and general hackishness. Meyers turns in a respectful account of Maugham, delivering a few nicely turned surprises that touch on, for instance, Maugham’s service as a spy in the South Seas and early Bolshevik Russia. All that doesn’t make the writer any more likable (as Meyers quotes C.P. Snow as observing, visiting Maugham was “rather like visiting one’s family lawyer”), but such moments at least make him seem more interesting.
A major biography, then, of a minor figure.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41475-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Reyna Grande ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2012
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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by Joshua Davis ; adapted by Reyna Grande
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edited by Reyna Grande & Sonia Guiñansaca
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by Reyna Grande
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