Less a conventional biography than a critical appraisal of the subject’s character, career and contradictions—not likely to...
In her own memoirs, How I Came into My Inheritance (2001), Gallagher has shown herself to be an incisive, sharp-edged, darkly humorous writer, and these qualities help engage readers in a study of Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) that might otherwise seem mean-spirited.
The author has no personal ax to grind against her subject, as do many of the sources she quotes, but her portrait is all the more devastating since it seems so matter-of-fact. The best she can say about Hellman is that she was “a conundrum—a person whose determination to prevail in all aspects of her life was often at odds with the persona of moral rectitude she presented to the world.” Her longest success, as a playwright, started with her relationship with Dashiell Hammett and ended with him, leading Gallagher to suggest that on her own, Hellman would not have amounted to nearly as much. Her memoirs, which gave her a literary resurgence, are dissected for untruths and half-truths, usually self-serving. She was an unapologetic Stalinist (as was her lover Hammett) who was either ignorant or uncaring about the realities of the brutal dictator’s rule. “What seems most peculiar in Hellman’s casual misuse of factual truth is her comfort with what might be easily shown to be untrue,” writes Gallagher, using the memory Hellman spun into the highly acclaimed movie Julia (1977) as an example. Gallagher comes closest to admiration in her accounts of Hellman’s promiscuity, which reportedly resulted in at least seven abortions. “She was never very pretty,” writes the author, “and there is no doubt that all her life she suffered from a lack of beauty, although it never seemed to impede her very active sexual life.” Or: “Few beautiful women could equal Hellman’s sexual success; few had her boldness, her presence, her nerve.”
Less a conventional biography than a critical appraisal of the subject’s character, career and contradictions—not likely to add any luster to Hellman’s tarnished reputation.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-16497-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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