A fascinating, thoughtfully organized, thoroughly researched, often surprising biography of the enigmatic author of The...
Fitzsimons (Wilde’s Women: How Oscar Wilde Was Shaped by the Women He Knew, 2017) explores the controversial life and groundbreaking contributions of iconic Victorian children’s author and social activist Edith Nesbit (1858-1924).
Relying on letters, memoirs, poetry, stories, and archival materials, the author reveals familiar as well as unexpected details and anecdotes from Nesbit’s tempestuous, bohemian life. She documents how Nesbit’s father’s death, her sister’s illness, and subsequent family upheavals shaped her into an anxious child with a fertile imagination who began writing poetry at age 11. A life-changing marriage to ardent womanizer Hubert Bland when she was seven months pregnant forced Nesbit to “muster what resources, determination, and ingenuity she had to support her family” through her writing. Throughout their unorthodox marriage, Nesbit tolerated her husband’s many flaws. Attractive and vivacious, Nesbit was “always surrounded by adoring young men” and had “intensely romantic friendships with several,” including George Bernard Shaw. Delving into Nesbit’s formative involvement in the Fabian Society and ardent campaigning to alleviate poverty, Fitzsimons suggests Nesbit’s socialist views influenced her children’s books. Favoring unconventional loose-fitting dresses and short hair, Nesbit’s attitude toward women’s rights and suffrage was surprisingly “hostile.” Frequent quotes from Nesbit’s children’s books illustrate how she “populated her stories with people and events from her past,” recasting herself and her siblings as the Bastable children in The Story of the Treasure Seekers. Fitzsimons ably demonstrates how Nesbit’s singular ability to write from the perspective of a child, weaving magic and fantasy into everyday life in a colloquial style, became the prototype for modern children’s fiction. She shines a welcome spotlight on a life “as extraordinary as anything found in the pages of her books.”
A fascinating, thoughtfully organized, thoroughly researched, often surprising biography of the enigmatic author of The Railway Children.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3897-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
