Affectionate and intimate, this hefty biography should help Powell find new readers.
An authorized biography of the prolific and underappreciated English writer.
Award-winning biographer and journalist Spurling (Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth, 2010, etc.) writes early on that urbane Anthony Powell (1905-2000), whom she met when she was in her 20s, “made me his biographer long ago.” Her friendship with “Tony” provided her with access to his diaries, letters, and numerous interviews. As the son of a British officer, Powell’s early, itinerant years resulted in an “energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child’s point of view.” Throughout his life, writes Spurling, “human behavior entranced him.” He found a “community that accepted him” at Eton, but his years at Oxford were depressing: “How little I liked being” there, he said. Powell’s friendship with fellow student Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green) led to their reading together Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and their realization that the “novel as they knew it could never be the same again.” After graduating, Powell secured an apprentice publisher’s job at Duckworths. “Nothing taught him more about the technical side of writing” than hours spent reading unsolicited manuscripts. He met authors and artists and attended parties, all the time observing. Spurling’s account of this English publishing world is delightful. Powell decided that his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), would be an “urban pastoral,” which Spurling describes as a “dry run” for his later masterwork, A Dance to the Music of Time, a panoramic series of 12 volumes written over 25 years. As a novelist, writes the author, “his imagination remained to the end essentially pictorial.” Readers will enjoy Spurling’s descriptions of Powell’s literary friendships with, among others, Evelyn Waugh, the Sitwells, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, and V.S. Naipaul; less so, her numerous, detailed descriptions of dinner parties.
Affectionate and intimate, this hefty biography should help Powell find new readers.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52134-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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