by Colin Asher ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
A brisk, well-documented homage.
A champion of the downtrodden and marginalized was celebrated and reviled in his own time.
A fervent admirer of Nelson Algren (1909-1981), essayist Asher, a 2015/2016 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, makes his book debut with a thoroughly researched, empathetic look at the life of the irascible, controversial writer. Drawing on sources from nearly 50 archives, including audio interviews and other material deposited by Algren’s previous biographer; Algren’s writings, letters, and interviews; and a “very lightly redacted” copy of Algren’s 886-page FBI file, Asher aims to correct the “misunderstandings and inaccuracies” that have sullied Algren’s reputation: notably, that he was an alcoholic, a “loner who burned every bridge he crossed,” and a writer whose publishing problems were largely his own fault. Many of those inaccuracies derived from Conversations with Nelson Algren, published in 1964, in which Algren himself conveyed an image of “a shallower, tougher, more careless, more misogynistic, less emotional, less intellectual, and lonelier person than he had ever truly been.” Although Asher tries mightily to counter that image, his findings often confirm them. Algren was certainly a hard drinker, thin-skinned, and sometimes paranoid. He “spent the first six decades of his life trying, and mostly failing, to balance a long list of competing and contradictory desires.” He yearned for critical acclaim but also “the freedom to express controversial ideas.” He wanted “devoted friends and the stability and comfort of a home, a wife, and children,” but he could never settle down with a woman without feeling stifled, and he wanted to go out whenever and wherever he pleased. “Chasing those urges,” Asher admits, “had left Nelson feeling lonely and regretful.” Because of his communist sympathies, the FBI kept a file on Algren beginning in 1940, creating professional and personal obstacles. Without knowing the FBI’s involvement in his career, Algren blamed his own shortcomings and became anxious and depressed. Asher chronicles Algren’s marriages and affairs, especially with Simone de Beauvoir, who, much to Algren’s dismay, publicized intimate details in her memoir, and he offers evenhanded readings of Algren’s works.
A brisk, well-documented homage.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-24451-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Emmanuel Carrère translated by Linda Coverdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2011
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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