Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940), clever, sociable, and film-star handsome, published 65 books—including novels, memoirs, histories, and texts on Ping-Pong and ice-skating—and innumerable ghost stories, essays, reviews, and plays, his effortless production attracting both enough admirers to form the E.F. Benson Society with its newsletter, Dodo, and such talented biographers as Masters—whose 17 books—including lives of Rabelais, Camus, Moliäre, and one mass murderer—help him understand this prolific writer. However affable and charming on the surface, Benson apparently was as secretive, compulsive, egocentric, and sexually dysfunctional as his siblings. They included a sister who killed herself in an insane rage; a Roman Catholic monsignor who fantasized being beaten by Italian police and feared being buried alive; and another brother who was besieged by demons of melancholia and guilt—all of them writing obsessively about themselves, repulsed by human touch, idealizing the kind of hypothetically chaste homosexual relationships their mother preferred after the death of their broodingly depressive father, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Intellectually a trivialist, Benson studied Greek archaeology, mastered figure-skating, visited Capri with various young men, and ended up as the mayor of Rye. His major inventions: David Blaise, a faintly disguised account of his own schoolboy romances; Dodo, whose ``artful prattle'' influenced the expression of youthful society in 1893; the silly and sentimental Lucia and the ``malevolently curious'' Miss Mapp, both the subjects of a series of novels; and an evocation of Edwardian society in As We Were. With respect and sympathy, Masters explores the mania behind Benson's prolific writing—the conflicting motives to express himself and to deflect attention from his own anguish; his drive to control ``the overloaded circuits of his brain,'' writing for therapy, for concealment, for compensation, and producing, ironically, a terrible sense of futility and of unfulfillment. Masters creates a haunting and poignant story of misconstrued literary success, his pace, light touch, and elegant style evocative of Benson himself.
Pub Date: March 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-7011-3566-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Chatto & Windus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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