A biography that reluctantly digs the dirt—and there's an awful lot of it—on famed Kenyan-born aviatrix Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly the Atlantic and once the presumed author of the bestselling West with the Night. Long-time Kenya resident Trzebinski (The Kenya Pioneers, 1986; Silence will Speak, 1978), who knew Markham, draws on letters, diaries, and copious interviews to tell his subject's story. Throughout, we're reminded of Markham's difficult childhood: Abandoned by her wealthy English mother at age two, young Beryl was left to be raised by her father, his mistress, and the Africans on their farm. Markham received little formal education and even fewer notions of conventional piety and morality, but her father did teach her to ride and train horses, a skill that would provide her with a living throughout her life. But despite Trzebinski's patronizing plea that Markham's behavior was affected by her being more African than European, the aviatrix proved to be single-minded and often cruel in pursuit of what she wanted. She abandoned three husbands, one son, and numerous lovers (the Prince of Wales and his younger brother each became her lover while visiting Kenya); she betrayed friends like Karen Blixen, whose great love, Denys Finch Hatton, she seduced behind Blixen's back; and she never admitted that her third husband, Hollywood screenwriter Raoul Schumacher, wrote West with the Night. Trzebinski's evidence for all this is well documented and very persuasive—but to balance the heavy indictment, the author also emphasizes Markham's great courage, beauty, and charm. All the seamy settler shenanigans of life in Kenyan highlands are reprised in this gossipy, exhaustively researched Beryl Dearest. Another cult figure bites the dust. (Photos)
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03556-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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