A straightforward recounting of the difficult life of a woman of discerning literary taste.
A prestigious publishing house and the strong-willed woman who guided it.
In 1911, when 17-year-old Blanche Wolf (1894-1966) met Alfred Knopf, she felt immediately “drawn to his intellectual manner and self-possession.” By the time they married in 1916, they had already begun a publishing firm “devoted to high-quality fiction and nonfiction.” Biographer and journalist Claridge (Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners, 2008, etc.) details the firm’s development, unfortunately allowing chronology to dominate the narrative. In charge of fiction and poetry, Blanche amassed an estimable list of writers: within a few years, that list included T.S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Robert Graves, Elinor Wylie, Ezra Pound, H.L. Mencken (who became Blanche’s confidant), and Carl Van Vechten, who became a close friend and “perfect scout.” Through Van Vechten, Blanche connected with, and published, many Harlem Renaissance writers and modernists. Yet despite her ability to lure authors, she found herself “blithely dismissed” and often rudely disdained by Alfred and his overbearing father, who interfered relentlessly in the couple’s personal and professional lives. Rather than standing up for his wife, Alfred always “defended to the last the father he chose to remember as always being there for him.” Along with documenting Blanche’s prowess as a publisher, Claridge diligently chronicles her difficult marriage. Alfred was as obstreperous at home as he was at the office—to her and their only son, Pat. She was so worried about Alfred’s nastiness to Pat that she enrolled him in boarding schools, although she herself showed little maternal warmth. Pat said that earning his pilot’s wings was the only time his father seemed proud of him. Blanche responded to her marital problems by taking many lovers, including Leopold Stokowski, Jascha Heifetz, and Serge Koussevitsky. A chain smoker and heavy drinker, Blanche ruined her health by dieting to alarming thinness. Nearly blind, she died of cancer in 1966.
A straightforward recounting of the difficult life of a woman of discerning literary taste.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-11425-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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