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CREATING COLETTE

VOL. II, FROM BARONESS TO WOMAN OF LETTERS, 1912-1954

The eventful life of one of the century’s great libertines is told in such a breathless rush of facts, names, and juicy episodes that readers only casually aware of French author Colette will soon cry uncle. The second volume (after Creating Colette: From Ingenue to Libertine, 1873—1913, 1998) of Francis and Gontier’s lengthy biography picks up as the writer turns 40 and weds Henry de Jouvenel, editor of Le Matin. Now the baroness de Jouvenel, and pregnant, Colette nevertheless continued her wild ways, most notably with her public affair with the famed actress Musidora. Earlier, Colette had ignored her mother’s entreaties to visit her and upon her mother’s death refused to go to the funeral or wear mourning. Her daughter, Colette RenÇe, nicknamed Bel Gazou, or “pretty warbler,” would come in for similar neglect from the work- and career-oriented author. Independent as she was, Colette was no feminist: an opponent of civil rights for women, she found interest in politics to be grotesque, depriving women of the feminine charms of “incompetence, timidity, silence.” Colette’s lesbian and hetero affairs would continue well into the 1930s, when she married a diamond dealer named Maurice Goudeket, a man 15 years her junior. Her efforts to free him from a Nazi concentration camp during WWII became the stuff of the Colette legend. Her writing had become infused with Fourierist principles, a kind of French “free love” philosophy, which, as read in her major works—Gigi, Sido, The Break of Day, The Pure and the Impure—helped to create a following both popular and literary. Much honored, Colette was entered into the AcadÇmie Goncourt and the French Legion of Honor. When she died in 1954, she was granted a state funeral with full military honors. An enormous cataloguing of pertinent information but rendered with little or no grace or personal insight into its subject. (photos)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-883642-76-0

Page Count: 274

Publisher: Steerforth

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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