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
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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