This detailed study of the author of Quartet and Wide Sargasso Sea seems not so much a biography as a collection of annotated note cards and unedited lecture notes. Rhys, born in 1890 in Dominica, the West Indies, had a Welsh father and a mother who was a Dominican Creole. The Creole influence would pervade her life and writing. At the age of 17, Rhys left Dominica to go to England, where she tried several careers—actor, chorus girl, artist's model—before she started to write. Her familiarity with the seedy side of London life is evident in her novels, many of which have the repeated theme of the helpless female, victimized by her dependence on a man for support and protection. Rhys had numerous love affairs throughout her long life; even at age 80, she enjoyed flirting with critic Alfred Alvarez, whose article about her in The New York Times Book Review on March 17, 1974, ``The Best Living English Novelist,'' made Rhys, briefly, a best seller. After several early novels such as After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) and Voyage in the Dark (1935), she stopped writing. Then she published Wide Sargasso Sea (1967), her story of the first marriage of Mr. Rochester of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Many of Rhys's novels have autobiographical origins, and Angier, an English writer and teacher, seems determined to connect every inhalation in Rhys's life with an exhalation in one of her novels. Thus, the reader stumbles through explanatory parentheses (as many as six a page), interspersed with speculative phrases (``I think''; ``Did she know? I doubt very much''; ``Would she have? Surely not''). Perhaps Angier's exhaustive but unsorted research will be of value to some future biographer who will do justice to Rhys, a fine writer.
Pub Date: June 3, 1991
ISBN: 0-316-04263-3
Page Count: 776
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
The former first lady opens up about her early life, her journey to the White House, and the eight history-making years that followed.
It’s not surprising that Obama grew up a rambunctious kid with a stubborn streak and an “I’ll show you” attitude. After all, it takes a special kind of moxie to survive being the first African-American FLOTUS—and not only survive, but thrive. For eight years, we witnessed the adversity the first family had to face, and now we get to read what it was really like growing up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and ending up at the world’s most famous address. As the author amply shows, her can-do attitude was daunted at times by racism, leaving her wondering if she was good enough. Nevertheless, she persisted, graduating from Chicago’s first magnet high school, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and pursuing careers in law and the nonprofit world. With her characteristic candor and dry wit, she recounts the story of her fateful meeting with her future husband. Once they were officially a couple, her feelings for him turned into a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.” But for someone with a “natural resistance to chaos,” being the wife of an ambitious politician was no small feat, and becoming a mother along the way added another layer of complexity. Throw a presidential campaign into the mix, and even the most assured woman could begin to crack under the pressure. Later, adjusting to life in the White House was a formidable challenge for the self-described “control freak”—not to mention the difficulty of sparing their daughters the ugly side of politics and preserving their privacy as much as possible. Through it all, Obama remained determined to serve with grace and help others through initiatives like the White House garden and her campaign to fight childhood obesity. And even though she deems herself “not a political person,” she shares frank thoughts about the 2016 election.
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6313-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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