In a biography thick with the historical and literary milieu of Marian ``George Eliot'' Evans, Karl (Franz Kafka: Representative Man, 1991, etc.) proves sensitive to the Victorian contradictions she faced as a first-rate intellect, a sensitive individual, and a plain woman. When ``George Eliot'' arrived with Scenes of Clerical Life, Marian Evans's life (181980), already two-thirds complete, was unknown to the public—a state she tried to preserve against what she called ``hard curiosity.'' Her life still holds many secrets, but Karl embarks on psychological anaylsis of her depressive personality and speculation about her private life while arguing for her as the representative Victorian voice over Dickens, Carlyle, and Ruskin, delving ably into her creative process in Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Although Karl starts strongly with her childhood in the slowly industrializing Midlands of the early Victorian era, he handles with less insight her intellectual development during her Evangelical phase and her expanding progressive education later (particularly her attachment to German culture and philosophy). Things pick up again with Evans's launching of a serious career in letters and her move to London. There she had fraught relationships with Westminster Review publisher John Chapman and future Darwinist Herbert Spencer. Karl argues that her unconventional relationships with men (the Chapman set-up was a virtual menage Ö quatre), while emotionally frustrating, allowed her to escape Victorian restrictions on women and to absorb intellectual resources before moving on. This process clicked with her lifelong companion George Lewes, who, though unable to divorce his wife, lived with Evans as a husband in what she called ``dual solitude.'' Though Karl falls short of fully comprehending Evans as an individual, his biography carefully depicts both the ceaseless intellect and the woman in one of the Victorian era's outstanding novelists. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03785-1
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
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
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