A good bit of journalistic documentation related in lackluster writing.
Overly detailed look at the expert manipulations of an attractive young Parisian on the make and the English prince who fell for her.
To his journalistic credit, historian and barrister Rose (Stinie: Murder on the Common, 1985) doggedly pursues the sordid, classic tale of a Parisian girl largely abandoned by her parents who used her street smarts to make her way to rather spectacular success. Marguerite Alibert, aka Maggie Meller, among other names, was raised largely in state institutions and then placed in the Parisian home of a wealthy lawyer before becoming pregnant at age 16 in 1906. Showing a promising petite figure and willingness to learn, she quickly went from being a high-class prostitute in the fashionable 16th arrondissement, where she gained all kinds of lessons in manners, dress and elocution, to being the kept mistress for wealthy benefactors such as the Duke of Westminster. The duke introduced her to the young Prince of Wales in 1917, when he was on leave in Paris during World War I. Keen to have his own French mistress, the prince lost his head for the “poule de luxe,” whose specialty was in the arts of the dominatrix. The problem was indiscretion on the part of the prince, who wrote elaborate letters to Marguerite letting slip details about the military conduct of the war, “letters very probably scabrous into the bargain” and very worrisome to British officials. Marguerite had her eye to blackmail, yet she wisely bided her time until she happened to be indicted for murdering her Egyptian husband in London’s Savoy Hotel on July 3, 1923. Rose admirably tracks down Marguerite’s intriguing story, but he provides altogether too much information.
A good bit of journalistic documentation related in lackluster writing.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04069-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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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