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WALT WHITMAN

A GAY LIFE

A book about ``the most gaily, muscularly, and relentlessly phallic writer in the annals of literature.'' Schmidgall, who is also Oscar Wilde's biographer (The Stranger Wilde, 1994), has chosen here not to write a biography in the usual way. Instead, he offers six long, thematically linked essays about the poet's gradual homosexual evolution, interspersed with candid first-person comments by Schmidgall (who is gay) that try to narrow the historical gap between gay culture in New York circa the 1850s and that of today. Because of Schmidgall's quite specific goals, this is not a good first Whitman biography for the layperson. Yet it holds other charms. Unlike most writers of ``lives,'' as a stylist Schmidgall gives himself plenty of breathing room. He rarely writes the sort of pared-down, minimalist declarative sentences that keep many other biographies going. Rather, his preference is loosely Whitmanian: orotund, spacious, personal, and rhythmic writing, which can make for bagginess and turgor at times. But two voices travel engagingly alongside each other, edging into an odd harmony: Whitman's and his biographer's. If that artfulness were not enough to beguile, then consider Schmidgall's intriguing range of subjects: Whitman's discovery of opera in midlife as the decisive influence on his mature poetry; a speculative chronicle of the writer's love life; Whitman's dogged amanuensis, Horace Traubel; the kinship between Whitman and Oscar Wilde, who met in 1882. It is an undeniable hindrance to Schmidgall's research effort that so little indisputable documentary evidence exists to prove his hunches about the identity and number of Whitman's amours. This lack of evidence can give the author's sometimes rhapsodic guesswork and impassioned assertions the feeling of willed fantasy. But the biographer's insights and imputations depend as much on his innate literary and personal sympathy for the poet, as he confides in detail in a fascinating autobiographical afterword. An unfailingly humane treatment. (photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1997

ISBN: 0-525-94373-0

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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