by Andrew Motion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1998
Whether illuminating Keats's famous lines or unearthing long-occluded facts about the most ill-starred of English Romantic poets, this superb biographical study displays an unusually sensitive erudition. Keats died of tuberculosis in 1821, at age 25, leaving behind only a few slim volumes' worth of poems. In his lifetime Keats was roundly mocked by critics—so much so that many of his contemporaries imagined him to have died of shame. These facts have given rise to an image of him as a sickly dreamer, ``half in love,'' as one of his celebrated odes puts it, ``with easeful death.'' It is this image of Keats that Motion (Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, 1993) tries to put to rest. Motion highlights the tough side of Keats's character, introducing us to the child prone to brawling and fits of rage, and to the young man whose strenuous walking tour of Britain may have contributed to the breakdown of his health. This Keats was intensely engaged with society. He nursed first his mother, and then his brother Tom, as they died of consumption, and his mother's death inspired him to enter the medical profession and train as a surgeon. Motion argues convincingly that Keats saw his poetic vocation as consistent with this work, showing how his poems abound in expertly depicted bodies and often seem to have a therapeutic aim. Sometimes this desired effect would be on the body politic: Motion shows too how Keats's poems were informed by his radical politics—shaped in great part by his mentor, the radical journalist Leigh Hunt—and by his reactions to such crises in the reform movement as the Peterloo massacre. Himself a noted poet, Motion writes sprightly, striking prose: For instance, he describes Fanny Brawne, Keats's inamorata, as ``unformed, frisky, and quick-tongued: conventional in her tastes; vehement in her enjoyments.'' Far from burying Keats in a doorstop-biography tomb, Motion has embodied him in a book that is itself vehemently enjoyable. (b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-18100-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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