An elegiac work of literary archaeology by the knighted British biographer of Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey.
As the third volume of his memoirs—after Basil Street Blues (2000) and Mosaic (2004)—which similarly offer an intriguing mix of biography and autobiography (“I seek invisibility behind the subjects I am trying to bring alive on the page”), Holroyd (A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families, 2009, etc.) focuses here on the lives of two Bloomsbury-era women who were linked to the same man. Visits to the literary mecca Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, Italy, put the author on the track of a former owner of the house, an English dilettante, ex-banker, widower and Edwardian patron of the arts, Ernest Beckett turned Lord Grimthorpe, who commissioned a bust in 1901 from Rodin of Beckett’s fiancée, Eve Fairfax, only to jilt her soon after. Left with the bill, Eve nonetheless charmed the great, now-aged French sculptor, and over the next eight years their friendship flowered. The bust eventually sold (with his permission) in order to help support this intelligent, cultured woman who would remain unmarried and of scant independent means. Holroyd was able to locate Eve’s precious diary, which he calls her book of secrets, in which she accumulated autographs, photos of dear friends, scraps of poems and memories that record what she believed was a “useful” life. The other main protagonist is the legendary literary sprite, novelist and muse Violet Trefusis, Beckett's illegitimate daughter. Holroyd delved into the novels and life of Trefusis, delineating her torrid, life-transforming affair with Vita Sackville-West, and he quotes amply from their correspondence for a lively, satisfying adventure. Literary enthusiasts will delight in this lovely narrative for its own sake. Purportedly Holroyd’s “last book,” this is an elegant literary study by a seasoned biographer and wonderfully engaging writer.
Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-11558-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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