Captivating, gossipy social history.
The tale of a small group of upper-middle-class young women who inhabited the rarefied world of literary London during and after World War II.
Drawing on rich archival sources and the many memoirs, novels, and stories written by his prolific cast of characters, British biographer, novelist, and cultural historian Taylor (The New Book of Snobs, 2017, etc.), winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography, creates a brisk, spirited portrait of the astonishingly beautiful women who “fizzed” around Cyril Connolly, “a genuine literary power-broker, a grand panjandrum, a maker—and breaker—of reputations,” in 1940s Britain. Self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent, “easily wounded, unforgiving, dislikeable, delightful,” according to a male friend, Connolly inspired “unfeigned devotion” in his female admirers. “Whether they were living with him, employed by him, pursued by him or merely wistfully regarded by him from afar,” Taylor writes, “he was the fulcrum on which their existence turned.” Among those in his orbit, the author focuses mostly on four: Lys Lubbock, a devoted caretaker and survivor of a nine-year affair with Connolly; fiery Barbara Skelton, who married him; his editorial assistant, Sonia Brownell, who married George Orwell; and Janetta Parladé, who was 17 when Connolly anointed her his “muse.” Christened “the lost girls” by poet and critic Peter Quennell, they had “spent their adolescence scheming to escape” oppressive, often fractured, family life. Flouting convention and flaunting independence, still, they yearned for security and love. Physically, they were a type: notably attractive, “tallish, slim to the point of skimpiness” (except for Sonia). Financially vulnerable, each spent the war years “moving from place to place and billet to billet as the demands of work, romance and inclination took her.” Living in an unheated bedsitter, they might depend on “an eligible or not so eligible suitor” to pick up the tab at upscale restaurants. “Glamorous, edgy and inimitable,” the lost girls, Taylor concedes, left no indelible legacy except perhaps as a link between emancipated young women of the 1920s and the “Dionysiac hordes of the 1960s and 1970s.”
Captivating, gossipy social history.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64-313315-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
