A rare, welcome look at the art and craft of biography.
A biographer recalls the challenges of writing her first books.
Bair (Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend, 2016, etc.), who won a National Book Award for her first biography, of Samuel Beckett, and critical acclaim for her biography of Simone de Beauvoir, has been asked, time and again, “what were they really like?” In a candid and engrossing memoir, Bair creates unvarnished portraits of those two headstrong, demanding, and brilliant individuals as well as of her growth as a researcher, writer, and feminist. The author had just completed her doctoral dissertation on Beckett when she asked for his cooperation in writing his biography. He replied immediately, agreeing to meet her in Paris. “I will neither help nor hinder you,” he told her. “My friends and family will assist you and my enemies will find you soon enough.” During many years of research, she discovered the truth of his remark, as she interviewed scores of his friends, relatives, hangers-on, and vociferous enemies, all of whom she renders in lively detail. Although Beckett did not overtly interfere, he kept tabs on her research, often making her feel “like a marionette whose strings he was pulling.” After her book was published, she found that she had made her own enemies among critics and scholars she calls Becketteers, who reviewed her book with “unrelenting hostility.” Suffering “a minor breakdown,” Bair thought the biography would be her last. When an admiring editor encouraged her to think of a new subject, however, de Beauvoir quickly came to mind. She was, Bair thought, “the only modern woman who had made a success of everything,” an achievement that astonished Bair, who was juggling the responsibilities of a wife, mother, writer, and professor. She often considered the aging de Beauvoir to be “lumpy, dumpy, frumpy, and grumpy”; although agreeing to cooperate, she was reluctant to discuss sensitive issues, notably regarding sexuality. Besides offering privileged views of her celebrated subjects, Bair reveals herself struggling with structure and style and negotiating a world of publishing and academia not welcoming to women.
A rare, welcome look at the art and craft of biography.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54245-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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