An accomplished biography of a minor writer made famous by her times.
A granddaughter brings alive the woman who created Mrs. Miniver, the perfect wife and mother who affirmed British values on the eve of WWII.
Making adroit use of quotes from the author’s letters, autobiography, and other writings, Graham creates a sensitive and full-rounded portrait of a woman whose temperament and interests were often at odds with her milieu. Born in 1901 to parents who later divorced, Joyce Anstruther went to school with the future Queen Mother and was raised like other proper little girls. But her mother, who also wrote, encouraged Joyce in early authorial efforts, published under the pseudonym Jan Struther. In 1923, she married Tony Maxtone Graham, the son of a Scottish laird. They were initially happy and had three children but drifted apart as Tony took up golf while Joyce contributed poems and articles to Punch and other publications. In 1936, she found a new outlet, writing twice a month in the London Times about a fictional middle-aged upper-class wife and mother. Mrs. Miniver, unlike her creator, was happily married, but the columns avoided complacency thanks to sharp insights and vivid metaphors (a rickety old car was “at best a reluctant and treacherous ally, and of late . . . more or less openly, our enemy”), and it struck a chord with English readers. Working with refugees after war broke out, Joyce fell in love with an intellectual young Austrian Jew, Dolf Placzek, and followed him to New York when he got a visa in 1940, ostensibly at the behest of her American publisher. Graham then relates how the collected volume of Mrs. Miniver columns became a bestseller and later a movie, rallying support for war-torn Britain. Jan (as she had called herself ever since she arrived in America) enjoyed the fame, but after her divorce and marriage to Dolf, she became severely depressed and unable to write. She died in 1953.
An accomplished biography of a minor writer made famous by her times.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-30826-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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