A riveting account of a gentle man overwhelmed by one of the waves of American hysteria that occasionally obliterate our...
A poignant, distressing portrait of Arvin (1900–63), one of our premier literary critics, whose distinguished career as a professor and writer was destroyed by the revelation of his homosexuality.
Werth (Damages, 1998, etc.) employs his considerable reportorial and narrative skills to relate the sad case of Arvin, whose 37-year teaching career at Smith College and whose trenchant studies of Hawthorne and Herman Melville (among others) had earned him a peerless reputation in the groves of academe as well as in the larger literary world. The story begins on September 2, 1960, when the police arrive at Arvin’s door in Northampton, Mass., to arrest him for possession of pornography (a felony under Massachusetts law at the time). Faced with the very real possibility of a prison sentence, Arvin became an informer and gave police the names of others involved in what became known as the “Smith College Homosexual Scandal of 1960.” Werth then leaps back to 1924—the year Arvin arrived at Smith—and proceeds to outline his swift, astonishing ascent to the very pinnacle of his profession. Arvin’s friends—Van Wyck Brooks, Carson McCullers, Edmund Wilson, Granville Hicks, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sylvia Plath—were a veritable Who’s Who of American literature. And the friendships weren’t entirely intellectual, either: One of Arvin’s lovers was Truman Capote, with whom he had a passionate two-year relationship and whose undying devotion supported him in his most trying times. Arvin had psychological problems throughout his life; he was institutionalized many times and in 1952 underwent a course of electroshock treatments. In the grim anti-gay decades of the mid-20th century, he had tried to live as a heterosexual (a marriage, a divorce) and as a closeted homosexual—decisions that shredded him psychologically. But when he could work, he worked spectacularly well (his study of Melville won a National Book Award). Werth devotes the final third of his book to the public humiliation of Arvin and some of his gay colleagues and ends with a brief update on the careers of the principals involved.
A riveting account of a gentle man overwhelmed by one of the waves of American hysteria that occasionally obliterate our national common sense.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49468-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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