We’ve heard it all before, but it’s well worth hearing again.
A brief comparative study of the lives, works and attitudes of two great 20th-century authors.
Hardly an original work, Lebedoff (The Uncivil War: How a New Elite is Destroying Our Democracy, 2004, etc.) offers a series of linked analyses and speculations based on information readily available in standard biographies and related works about the worlds in which both men lived and did battle. This book’s premise and purpose, however, are distinctive, in that Lebedoff surveys his subjects’ histories as illustrative of their essential similarity, even oneness (hence his title), despite obvious differences in personality, social standing and worldviews. Waugh was a ferociously devout Catholic, Orwell an equally impassioned anti-communist and socialist “concerned entirely with this world…[while Waugh was preoccupied] with the next.” Lebedoff thus compares and contrasts Waugh’s celebrity-obsessed school experiences, abortive teaching career and disastrous first marriage with the stoicism exhibited by Eric Blair (before he adopted the famous nom de plume), who renounced any possibility of rising socially, joining the British civil service as a policeman stationed in Burma. Subsequently, there are juxtaposed considerations of each man's literary trials and triumphs; Waugh’s misadventures in Croatia as a scandalously unconventional officer and gentleman; the increasingly tubercular Orwell’s days as a Home Guard during the London Blitz; both men as husbands and fathers. Pages are filled by such risible expedients as a potted biography of the Mitford sisters, a needless summary of the overfamiliar plot of Brideshead Revisited and a labored analysis of this “masterpiece” and Orwell’s 1984 as each author’s grave Final Statement. Fortunately, both Orwell and Waugh are such engagingly stubborn and heroic figures that there’s no resisting such deservedly well-known anecdotes as Captain Waugh’s maliciously merry rumor-mongering insistence that Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito was a woman.
We’ve heard it all before, but it’s well worth hearing again.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6634-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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