An often lyrical ballad with some superfluous, unmelodious stanzas.
Wilson continues her examination of the fraught terrain where sex and literature meet (Literary Seductions, 2000, etc.) in a bleak biography of the celebrated poet’s unmarried sister.
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) shared the home, the vision, the language, the life and—at least upon occasion, it seems—the bed of her brother William (1770–1850), devoting herself to his art and comfort. Wilson begins with one of the oddest moments in literary history, the morning of William’s 1802 marriage, when he went into his sister’s bedroom to retrieve the wedding ring she had worn all night. The author will return to this incident from a new perspective in the final pages, but initially she moves back to proceed in fairly chronological fashion, quoting liberally from the principals’ papers and commenting on the Wordsworths’ relationship with others, principally Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Wilson sees an almost psychic connection between Coleridge and Dorothy, both of whom William in a sense betrayed.) The text focuses largely on Dorothy’s Grasmere Journals, kept during her sojourn in the Lake Country with William from 1800 to 1803, which Wilson judges as evidence that the poet’s sister was “one of our finest nature writers.” William’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson was traumatic, but Dorothy honeymooned with the couple and lived with them for the rest of her days, which were darkened from the 1830s on by mental illness. Wilson veers occasionally into uncertain terrain. Though it might be wiser to eschew contemporary medical and psychological analyses of 200-year-old somatic illnesses and relationships, the undaunted author quotes Oliver Sacks on migraines and diagnoses elderly Dorothy with “depressive pseudodementia.” Wilson frequently summarizes the research of others, then declares it inadequate, wrong, biased. Scholars will find it difficult to locate documentation for such assertions or simply to check contexts for quotations: The author provides no endnotes, just an appended “bibliographic essay.” Still, much of her well-researched text is graceful, perceptive and poignant.
An often lyrical ballad with some superfluous, unmelodious stanzas.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-10867-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
