Like Wineapple's Genàt: A Biography of Janet Flanner (1989), an impressively researched portrait of American expatriates—in this case, the writer Gertrude Stein (18741946) and her brother Leo (18721947), a pioneering modern art collector. The author begins with the Steins' roots in Baltimore's affluent, cultivated German-Jewish immigrant community. Orphaned before either was 20, the siblings had financial independence, which freed them to concentrate on their intellectual life. Gertrude specialized in psychology at Harvard and nearly attained a medical degree from Johns Hopkins before abandoning it with a shrug. Leo's studies at the same two institutions were less focused, but he was known as an expert on art and opera. In 1902 he led the way to Paris and the famous apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus, which became a showcase for extraordinary paintings and a gathering place for the avant garde. His sister joined him in 1903, and they began collecting works by CÇzanne, Picasso, and Matisse, while Gertrude groped in early writings like Three Lives toward the elliptical prose style that would provide a literary equivalent to the artists she loved. Wineapple makes good use of formidable amounts of material—the Steins apparently committed to paper every mental hiccup—to give vivid impressions of her subjects' characters: Gertrude earthy, gregarious, and domineering; Leo more neurotic, indecisive, and introspective. The author also captures the gossipy, close-knit world they moved in. She does not quite succeed, however, in elucidating the dynamics of the pair's exceptional closeness, nor does her account of their estrangement in 1914 offer much beyond the facts: Alice B. Toklas and the woman who would become Leo's wife drew them apart; the final blow was Leo's failure to appreciate Gertrude's increasingly experimental prose. They died 12 months and two days apart, still not speaking. Thorough and intelligent, but lacking that final spark of empathy that distinguishes a truly exceptional biography. (b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14103-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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