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DOROTHY L. SAYERS

Name: DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Author: Barbara Reynolds
ISBN: 0-312-09787-5

HER LIFE AND SOUL

by Barbara Reynolds ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1993

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Another ``interim report'' on the life (1893-1957) of the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and reluctant Christian apologist, by a longtime friend, completer of Sayers's translation of Dante and author of The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter with Dante (1989- -not reviewed). The problem all Sayers's biographers face is to reconcile her early career as a pioneer and leading theorist of the formal detective story with the religious plays, essays, and lectures to which she committed her last 15 years. In the absence of a collected edition of Sayers's letters, Reynolds still tries to make Sayers speak for herself whenever possible by quoting letters, conversations, and passages from her voluminous writings. The result is a view of the writer that Sayers herself would likely have approved of: as a generous, fiercely intelligent woman whose cardinal passion, her intellectual ardor, led her from Oxford to the hand-to-mouth London bohemianism that spawned the inimitably foppish Wimsey and then, quite logically, to a defense of the writer's imagination (The Mind of the Maker) that set forth Sayers's understanding of the Trinity. Despite some stiffness in the early chapters, and a disinclination to criticize her subject even mildly, Reynolds captures the ardent nature that sustained Sayers through her unrequited love affairs, her pregnancy without marriage, her lifelong support of the son she never publicly acknowledged, and the writing she felt certain from the beginning was her vocation. It isn't until the popular Wimsey books are behind, though, that Reynolds's matching passion comes out—she calls The Mind of the Maker and The Man Born to Be King Sayers's ``two greatest works''—and the biography comes into its own, even though only a few years of Sayers's life remain before Reynolds encounters the preemptive shadow of her own earlier book. Best, then, on the later years—the years of her own friendship with Sayers—that Reynolds has already described so sympathetically. Fans of Lord Peter may feel let down. (Thirty b&w photographs)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-312-09787-5

Page Count: 416

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
CORETTA
by Coretta Scott King with Barbara Reynolds ; illustrated by Ekua Holmes

- BOOK REVIEW
MY LIFE, MY LOVE, MY LEGACY
by Coretta Scott King with Barbara Reynolds

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

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)