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CONVERSATIONS WITH DVORA

AN EXPERIMENTAL BIOGRAPHY OF THE FIRST MODERN HEBREW WOMAN WRITER

An unorthodox, idiosyncratic portrait of Dvora Baron (18871956), an eccentric Israeli writer. Lieblich (Seasons of Captivity: The Experience of POW's in the Middle East, 1994, etc.; Psychology/Hebrew Univ., Israel) creates a series of imagined conversations between herself and Israel's first modern female Hebrew writer. From these conversations a perturbing portrait emerges both of a particular woman and of women's lives in general in the Russian shtetl and early Zionist settlements in Palestine. Baron was something of a phenomenon. Her father, a rabbi, was so impressed with her scholastic ability that he gave her an intense Jewish education alongside her brother. Infused with a love of learning, she left home at age 15 to pursue a secular education in Minsk. Baron became obsessed, however, with the plight of the many women who did not have her options. The author imagines her saying, ``Always and everywhere I saw their suffering. Those who were not touched by poverty or illness or fear of being put out in the street suffered at the hands of their husbands.'' Other imagined conversations delve into such topics as solitude, marriage, and the artistic temperament. Following her brother's death in 1923, the 36-year-old Baron secluded herself in her Tel Aviv apartment, where she remained mostly confined to her bed for over 30 years. The true nature of Baron's malady never emerges here, but her obsessive need for solitude does. And her strong bond with her only daughter, Tsipora—who dedicated her life to caring for her mother—remains unsettling. Although Baron's marriage to a journalist and social activist had enriched her life, she seems, in Lieblich's version, ambivalent about the institution of marriage. ``There is little hope for a man or woman who has reclusive tendencies, and a fragile talent that requires solitude, to acclimate themselves to domestic life.'' Supplemented by a short story by Baron, this book may reveal more about the biographer's psyche than her subject's. Nevertheless, its form and contents intrigue.

Pub Date: June 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-520-08539-6

Page Count: 296

Publisher: Univ. of California

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997

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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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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