An unauthorized and exhaustive biography of the author still best known for her 1971 feminist polemic The Female Eunuch. Wallace is a journalist and writer based in Australia, where Greer was born and educated by Roman Catholic nuns. Although Greer apparently objected strenuously to this biography and offered no cooperation, Wallace was able to tap sources worldwide, including those in Australia who knew the controversial author as either a well-behaved schoolgirl, a budding actress, or a flamboyant graduate student, challenging sexual and social mores. Her anti-authoritarian social philosophy was formed on the fringes of Australian academe, while she wrote a master’s thesis on Lord Byron that ignored his misogyny. Later, at England’s Cambridge University, her Ph.D. thesis included an analysis of The Taming of the Shrew. One of her conclusions: “There is hardly a woman alive who is not deeply attracted to . . . a man capable of . . . exercising [Petruchio’s] kind of sexual and domestic dominion.” Greer went on to become a 1960s groupie, teaching college courses during the day, bedding down with rock stars at night, and writing about it for magazines like Suck. Within a few years, The Female Eunuch had made her an international evangelist for a brand of countercultural feminism that eschewed sisterhood in favor of sex, but also examined the dynamics of marriage and women’s low self-esteem. Greer wrote other books, including a moving memoir about her emotionally absent father, yet none created the stir of her first. Now settled on a farm in England, she remains a favorite talk-show guest because of her sharp wit and still contentious opinions, and is said to have a new book in the works to be published this year. Ambivalent to women, wavering in her commitment to truth in Wallace’s portrait, Greer remains a flawed but fascinating subject. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-571-19934-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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