Cyril Connolly (190374) was an aesthetic Georgian gadfly, and Fisher (Noâl Coward, 1992) relates in a fittingly tart, gossipy style his stingings and dartings about the Brideshead generation. Connolly's ambitions, whether literary, social, or romantic, pulled him in multiple directions throughout his life, and Fisher tellingly brings out the resulting contradictions, successes, and failures. Although an Anglo-Irish outsider and scholarship boy at Eton (along with his friend George Orwell), Connolly aspired to embody the Georgian era—ambivalent nostalgia for both an earlier England and his schooldays, modish affiliation with the Modernist avant-garde and salon Marxism, and snobbish Francophilia and Classicism. But after initial failure to fulfill his early promise, Connolly earned his reputation first as the enfant terrible book reviewer of the New Statesman in the late '20s, then as the founder and editor of the highbrow wartime journal Horizon, and lastly as a BBC speaker. Despite an irregular literary output (with marriages and friendships to match), he sedulously championed high art and culture in prose that elegantly negotiated its way around Bloomsbury ``Mandarin'' style, Leavisite sententiousness, and Fleet Street vernacular. Imprisoned in this critic, though, the artist signaled only sporadically to be let out, leaving behind some first-rate parodies and one novel out of a mass grave of abandoned fiction. But Fisher facilely subscribes to the view of Connolly as brilliant failure without seriously addressing critical works such as The Condemned Playground or The Evening Colonnade. Fisher is more drawn to his subject's quasi-biographic works and the agitation and admiration they stirred up among friends and coevals such as Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Ernest Hemingway. As a personal portrait rather than a critical survey, this biography captures the alternatingly charming and exasperating critic whom his backbiting friend Evelyn Waugh called ``the most typical man of my generation.'' (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13953-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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