Nonetheless, the author offers evidence for Remarque’s basic decency—and for why All Quiet on the Western Front should be...
A welcome life of the German writer, the first in English, best known in his time and now for the classic novel All Quiet on the Western Front.
English biographer and novelist Tims never quite explains why Remarque (1898–1970) should merit renewed interest today, when almost all of his books have long since gone out of print in English translation. Still, he observes, German readers are rediscovering Remarque, who wrote plenty of frothy romances alongside his classic cri de antiguerre. “It would have given him a rueful satisfaction to know that it is in Germany that his work and reputation are nowadays held in the highest reputation,” Tims rightly observes, for Remarque was one of the first non-Jewish writers to attract the wrath of the Nazi regime; his books were banned and burned for their supposed defeatism, while Hitler’s propagandists chortled that Remarque (or “Remark,” as the writer rendered his name well into adulthood) was an anagram for Kramer. (It was not.) Driven into exile—though a luxurious one—in neighboring Switzerland, Remarque, who had bought himself a nobleman’s rank and had aristocratic leanings, did not vigorously or vocally oppose the Nazis; even so, his Aryan status having been proven to the satisfaction of the authorities, he wisely refused entreaties on the part of Hermann Goering to return to Germany and take on a job as Minister of Culture for Prussia. Instead, Remarque relocated to Hollywood, where he wrote a few scripts and earned local renown for conducting a series of affairs with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Paulette Goddard (whom he later married). That Remarque was never a great writer is a point that Tims successfully evades, and he unwisely attributes negative reviews in the postwar German press not to the possibility that the books in question weren’t good, but to “habitual German hostility towards the world-famous author.”
Nonetheless, the author offers evidence for Remarque’s basic decency—and for why All Quiet on the Western Front should be remembered today, even if its author is not.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1155-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.
Rock-’n’-soul icon Turner is happy at last, and she wants the world to know it.
The love story of the title is specific: The 78-year-old singer has been with her German mate for 33 years, and though bits and pieces of her body have been failing and misbehaving—she recounts a stroke, kidney failure, cancer, and other maladies—her love is going strong. It’s also generalized: Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, is enchanted by the world, from her childhood countryside to the shores of Lake Zurich, where she has lived nearly half her life. There was another love story, of course, the one that fans will know and lament: her marriage to the drug-addicted, philandering Ike Turner, of whom she writes, pointedly, “at this point in my life, I’ve spent far more time without Ike than with him.” The author emerges from these pages as self-aware and hungry for knowledge and experience. Who knew that she was a dedicated reader of Dante as well as a “favorite aunt” of Keith Richards and a practitioner of Buddhism of such long standing that Ike himself demanded that she lose her shrine? The gossip is light, though she’s clear on the many reasons she broke away from Ike. She’s also forgiving, and as for others in her circle over the years, she calls Mel Gibson “Melvin” because of his “little boy quality,” though she doesn’t approve of certain bad behavior of his. Mostly, her portraits of such figures as David Bowie and Bryan Adams are affectionate, and the secrets she reveals aren’t terribly shocking. Those fishnet stockings and short skirts, she lets slip, were more practical than prurient, the stockings running less easily than nylons and the short skirts “easier for dancing because they left my legs free."
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9824-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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