Papa’s relationships with women have been so amply explored that this memoir offers little that is fresh or illuminating.
Hemingway loved Hadley best.
Fans of Hemingway may relish this memoir by Hotchner (O.J. in the Morning, G&T at Night, 2013, etc.), who has mined his 14-year friendship with the writer to produce a biography, an edition of their correspondence, and several other books. Here, Hotchner offers a verbatim recollection of conversations that occurred in several locations, over many years, about Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richardson, which ended when he fell in love with Pauline Pfeiffer. After divorcing Hadley, he married Pauline, quickly discovering that he had made a huge mistake. Hadley, he confessed to Hotchner, was the love of his life. Although Hadley called her husband a romantic, he emerges here as self-absorbed, childish, and unbelievably naïve. According to Hemingway, Pauline insinuated herself into his life by befriending Hadley and spending a great deal of time with the couple. Soon, she seduced him; captivated by her attentions and “explosive, wildly demonstrative” sex, he fell in love. When Hadley discovered their affair, he became angry. Why should it matter? “I wanted to have both of them just as they were,” Hemingway told Hotchner. “I didn’t know much about women, did I?” Hadley gave him 100 days to get over what he called his “peculiar passion,” but to his surprise, she agreed to divorce before the time was up. “What I felt was the sorrow of loss. I had contrived this moment,” he said, “but I felt like the victim.” He felt even more surprise when Hadley quickly remarried, since he had nurtured the “fantasy that she would still be single when, as it seemed more and more likely, I would leave Pauline and return to her” and their son. Hotchner portrays Hemingway as sad and lonely, but he fails to generate sympathy for him.
Papa’s relationships with women have been so amply explored that this memoir offers little that is fresh or illuminating.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07748-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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