Expansive and lavish, this outstanding biography does much to demythologize Carter, revealing her to be a singular writer of...
The first comprehensive biography of the acclaimed British author.
In his debut, Gordon (English/King’s Coll. London) has done yeoman’s work crafting an authorized, sensitive, and well-written biography of an ebullient writer whose “ novels, short stories and journalism…stood defiantly apart from the work of her contemporaries.” She was largely ignored until she died (1940-1992), when the mythmaking began in earnest. Gordon focuses on how “she invented herself.” His portrait of the prolific writer who described herself as a “born fabulist” travels from her “shy, introverted childhood, through a nervy, aggressively unconventional youth, to a happy, self-confident middle age.” Born into a “matriarchal clan,” her mother wanted to control her, but her grandmother raised her “as a tough, arrogant and pragmatic Yorkshire child.” After school, Carter became a journalist and married a folk musician. College came later. Exposure to Baudelaire and Rimbaud convinced her she wanted to be a writer. After a few short stories, she wrote her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1966. This was followed by a “malevolent fairy tale,” The Magic Toyshop. These were surreal gothic/horror tales written in a baroque and arcane “style of luxuriant beauty.” Reading Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard added science fiction to her palette, resulting in Heroes and Villains, a “post-apocalyptic fairy tale.” Gordon notes that The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, jam-packed with her social and feminist principles, showed how she could transform her “day-to-day experience into strange, hallucinatory art,” and he calls the controversial The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography “a work of brilliantly sustained cultural criticism.” Always the iconoclast, Carter had her supporters, like Salman Rushdie, Robert Coover, and director Neil Jordan. Gordon’s narrative has a beautiful, effortless flow as he seamlessly moves back and forth from the life to the works.
Expansive and lavish, this outstanding biography does much to demythologize Carter, revealing her to be a singular writer of her time.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-062684-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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