This first nonacademic biography of Renault was developed by Sweetman (Van Gogh, 1990) from a rare interview granted him in 1981, two years before his subject's death. In that interview, Renault conveyed both her discomfort with being an ``apostle of the sexual revolution'' and her pride in the research behind her award- winning historical novels. Daughter of a provincial doctor, Renault attended St. Hugh's, an Oxford college for women. To escape an idle future as a maiden daughter living in her mother's sewing room, she trained to be a nurse. Along with the discipline and deprivation, she discovered her sexual nature and Julie Mullard, who was to become her life- long companion and the subject of her first novel, the subtly sexual The Purposes of Love (1939)—the first of Renault's series of contemporary novels that culminated in The Charioteer (1953), an open and sympathetic depiction of homosexual love. By the time it was published, Renault—in order to escape high taxes, the cold, and social rejection—had moved to South Africa, where she began publishing the historical novels for which she's best remembered. Carefully researched, richly imagined, her dignified representations of homosexuality among the heros and gods of ancient Greece and Rome won her a following of gay liberationists- -whose position she rejected as ``sexual tribalism.'' As honorary president of the Cape Town chapter of PEN, Renault was attacked by Nadine Gordimer for not including blacks in the chapter—which is about as controversial as Renault ever became: When she died at age 78, many still believed that her novels had been written by a man. Somewhere between this wary approach to an exceptional mind and the academic jargon that Renault seems to attract, there's still much to be explained. Renault continues to wear her own Mask of Apollo.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-15-193110-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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