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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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