With access to Cowley himself (1898-1989) and to his huge archives, Bak (American Literature/Catholic University of Nijmegen, Netherlands) has produced a detailed yet cluttered history of his subject's literary endeavors from 1915 to 1930—of his ``apprenticeship'' as poet, literary journalist, editor, and critic. Bak takes the same ``spectatorial attitude'' as Cowley took toward his culture. He observes the young man of letters from his boyhood in a pious Swedenborgian family in Pittsburgh to his years at ``godless'' Harvard—covering the professors Cowley studied with, the courses he took, his favorite authors, his friends. Bak reports on Cowley's service in 1917 in the Ambulance Corps in France, his return to Greenwich Village, and his marriage to an untidy bohemian whose infidelities infected them both with syphilis. The author recounts his subject's return to France in the 20's; his joining the expatriates he named the ``lost generation''; and the artistic experimentalism that became modernism as well as those who created it: Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats and Joyce. While doing freelance writing (including, from 1924-28, articles in Charm, a magazine published by Bamberger's department store for its female charge customers), Cowley, Bak relates, emancipated himself from the seclusive art of the symbolists and evolved into a socially responsible writer and a political radical, eventually succeeding Edmund Wilson as book-review editor of The New Republic (an evolution Cowley described in Exile's Return, 1934). An epilogue covers this ``return'' and establishes Cowley's literary stature. Bak names all the little magazines Cowley wrote for or cared about but misses the excitement, the ferment, that produced them. A rhetorical and lifeless biography, then, that reduces Cowley to the sum of his literary opinions. (Thirty-two illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8203-1323-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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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