The narrative path is sometimes obscured by a lush undergrowth of detail, but our guide is wise and the journey is wondrous.
The biographer of Orwell, Lowry and Durrell returns with a massively detailed narrative of the life of the author of Ulysses.
Bowker (Inside George Orwell, 2003, etc.) begins with several of the myriad epiphanies Joyce valued—the first, a moment when he was 16 and lost both his virginity and the Virgin (he decided that was fun, and no Jesuit priesthood for me). The author then announces his intentions—to show the complexities and contradictions of the man—and proceeds to do so in detail that is so impressive as to be overwhelming at times. Joyce (1882–1941) emerges as a mess of a man in these pages. The author charts the grim history of his eye problems (nearly a dozen eye operations, some involving leeches), his struggle to survive in the early days of his adulthood and marriage, the sad madness of his daughter, his enormous talents (he learned languages quickly, read everything) and his difficulty finding publishers for Dubliners and the more controversial works that followed. It took a famous Supreme Court ruling to decriminalize Ulysses in the United States. Joyce found a generous patron, though—Harriet Shaw Weaver—whose substantial gifts encouraged the spendthrift genius to live beyond his means, traveling throughout Europe, staying in first-class hotels, no longer the starving artist. Bowker’s labor to keep track of the plethora of places the Joyces lived is Herculean by itself. We see Joyce, too, as a prodigious worker who labored for endless hours, completing not just the shelf- and mind-bending novels Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake but a play, stories and essays. Bowker goes light on the literary criticism. We see Joyce at work and read about technique and intent, but there are few journeys into exegesis.
The narrative path is sometimes obscured by a lush undergrowth of detail, but our guide is wise and the journey is wondrous.Pub Date: June 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-17872-7
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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