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GEORGE ELIOT

A LIFE

The latest life of George Eliot (nÇe Mary Ann Evans), from the biographer of her lifelong companion, G.H. Lewes, brings out this independent-minded woman's shyness and self-doubt as well as her formidable artistic achievements. The opportunity for the Eliot biography industry began when Evans's young widower, John Cross, extended her strong sense of privacy to destroying some of her personal papers and bowdlerizing excerpts from her letters and journals for his respectful official life. This was not enough to stop the rumors and speculation that had begun after Evans made herself notorious by living with the married Lewes well before ``George Eliot'' gained fame as the author of Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede. In the search for the real George Eliot, Ashton (English/University College, London) adds her understated version of Evans's life to the several of the last ten years, the most recent being Frederick Karl's magisterial 1995 volume. Ashton moves swiftly through Evans's life, bringing her up from Midlands provincialism to intellectual cosmopolitanism, without dwelling too long on the religious and personal crises in her life. Evans's break with her family and friends, first over her faith, then over her relations with Lewes, seem especially muted, but the novelist herself always maintained a stoic front in her personal life. Like Evans, Ashton is more at home with intellectual matters, such as her interest in Goethe (and his influence on her), her early journalism for the Westminster Review, and, of course, her novels. Ashton, editor of the Penguin Middlemarch, does her best work in drawing out Evans's perspective from her plots and characterizations. If Gladstone called the first Eliot biography ``a Reticence in three volumes,'' Ashton's is an Admiration in one volume—but a readable and informed one at least. (16 pages b&w photos & illustrations)

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-713-99194-1

Page Count: 465

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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