by Diane Wood Middlebrook ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1991
Frustrated as a housewife and mother in suburban Boston and plagued by mental problems including suicidal obsessions, Sexton, beautiful, intense, and gifted, began writing poetry at age 29 on the advice of her therapist. Within ten years she had won nearly every prize available to an American poet—and collected hundred of hours of tapes from her therapy sessions. Access to these tapes and the intimate revelations of Sexton's family have enabled Middlebrook (English/Stanford; Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, 1974) to explore here some of the dynamics of creativity, and the relationship between art and mental disorder. Artful, oblique, confessional, Sexton's verse, as Middlebrook shows, is representative of her generation of emotionally distraught poets, nearly all addicted to booze, pills, sex, and to themselves: Anguished, broken, many ended up suicides. Robert Lowell, Roethke, Schwartz, Bishop, Rahv, Berryman, Rich, Jarrell, James Wright, Anthony Hecht, George Starbuck—they were a community of pain, friends or lovers, meeting at workshops, readings, or retreats. Their poetry is private, academic, and written to one another: Sexton wrote some of the best. But however much recognition Sexton received as a poet, her personal life remained at the edge, as the title of her first collection implies: To Bedlam and Partway Back (1960). And everyone was forced to share that space with her: Her husband adored, mothered, and finally beat her; her daughters, emotionally abandoned, finally rejected her, one confessing that her mother tried to seduce her; and her lovers- -men, women, even her therapist—were unable to fulfill her demands. Before she finally succeeded in committing suicide, however, she claimed she had ``lived to the hilt.'' Middlebrook is better at explicating the poems than she is at explaining the life. That remains, in spite of the tapes, a mystery, one of universal interest relevant to the large issues of poetry, madness, and suicide, but only tangentially related to the feminist thesis that Middlebrook prefers to associate with Sexton: a typical victim, she says, of society's repression of women. (Twenty-four b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-395-35362-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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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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