by Hubert H. McAlexander ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2001
Of use and interest to students of southern letters and postwar American fiction.
A workmanlike biography of the noted southern writer.
Peter Taylor (1917–94), the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Summons to Memphis and other novels, collections of stories, and plays, was the scion of an aristocratic Tennessee family whose patriarch abandoned small-town life for the bright lights of Nashville. Privileged and well-educated, the adolescent Taylor fell in with Nashville’s intelligentsia, at the center of which was the poet and critic Allen Tate, who, Taylor recalled, “made literature and ideas seem more important than anything else in the world, and you wanted to put everything aside and follow him.” Taylor’s earliest published work showed the influence of Tate and other writers of the Southern Agrarian movement, but, as McAlexander (English/Univ. of Georgia) observes, he soon moved beyond the symbolic, ideological program of the Agrarians to “probe the issues of perception, communication, love, and freedom that would engage him throughout his career.” After uneventful military service in the closing months of WWII, Taylor entered graduate school at Kenyon College and struck up a long friendship with the poet Robert Lowell; he later taught at Kenyon, Indiana University, the University of Virginia, and other colleges and universities in the Midwest and South, all the while publishing short stories in the New Yorker and books that would be alternately damned as ersatz Faulkner and championed as the rising voice of the New South. Unlike the mercurial Lowell (or Faulkner, for that matter), Taylor lived an exemplary life. Married for 51 years, abstemious, and evidently happy, Taylor had only one quirk: a passion for buying and selling houses, which nicely supplemented his professorial salary and royalties. The outright normality of his life, however, translates into an absence of juicy anecdotes of the sort that make biographies of writers so entertaining. Lacking any real drama—save the occasional real-estate coup—McAlexander’s narrative is respectful and thorough. And not much fun to read.
Of use and interest to students of southern letters and postwar American fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8071-2706-X
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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