by David Attwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Recent work receives comparatively short shrift, but Attwell provides a solid foundation for a literary appreciation.
A literary biography illuminating the development of the Nobel Prize–winning author’s work.
Identity is a crucial issue in the writing of Coetzee (The Childhood of Jesus, 2013, etc.), a literary master for whom the central question is not “who I am, as much as…what I am.” He was born in South Africa; he received his doctorate and started his academic career in the United States, from which he was exiled for a political protest; and he has been a naturalized Australian citizen for more than a decade. He writes fiction, nonfiction, and criticism, and his career as an academic has deeply informed his novels. He was a family man, though the wife from whom he was divorced in 1980 figures little in his work or this biography. “Aspects of Coetzee’s life that have little bearing on his authorship have little relevance to this book,” writes Attwell (English/Univ. of York), who was once his subject’s student and has remained a scholar of his work. Complicating the identity question is Coetzee’s “strong desire for self-masking.” He has written a series of memoirs in the third person, as if writing about another character, while in his fiction, he has frequently employed characters with some variation on his name. Rather than serving as an introduction to his work, this book will enrich the understanding of those already well-versed in the literature—it requires close reading of Coetzee, and it rewards it. The study untangles the threads of a creative process that always involves multiple drafts and often finds him juggling multiple projects, with passages put aside only to appear years or decades later in a new work. Though Coetzee is often considered more of a philosophical novelist or novelist of ideas, Attwell shows just how deeply the life and work are intertwined. The author quotes his subject: “All writing is autobiography…[and] all autobiography is storytelling.”
Recent work receives comparatively short shrift, but Attwell provides a solid foundation for a literary appreciation.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42961-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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