Sometimes familiar, sometimes fascinating discussion of the choreography of friendship, of the roots and routes of rivalry.
Literary friendships form and then sometimes falter or fail because writers, like the rest of us, grow away from each other, become competitive or have a failure to communicate.
Lingeman has substantial credentials as a critic of American literature, including a well-received biography of Sinclair Lewis (Sinclair Lewis, 2002), and his scholarship is much in evidence here. Although he does not in any systematic way ever define “friendship,” he does begin with some generic thoughts about why friendships form, change, endure, fracture. Following are his assessments of some of the most noted—and sometimes fragile—friendships in American literary history: Hawthorne and Melville, Twain and Howells, Wharton and James, Cather and Jewett, Dreiser and Mencken, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Ginsberg and Kerouac and Cassady. The author relies heavily on the research of others (dutifully recorded in the endnotes—many, many of which begin with “Quoted in . . .”), and so his observations are often more synthesis than thesis. (As he observes, scholars have written entire volumes on these relationships.) But he is a reliable and amiable companion on this journey that often traverses familiar territory. The expository pattern is much the same: an explanation of how the principals met, a glance back at how they arrived at their meeting, a description of the time they were together and how their relationship affected their works, an account of their estrangement(s) (if there were any), a note about how things stood when the first of them died. If some of these tales are more than twice-told (it’s hard to say something fresh about Hawthorne and Melville), others are perceptive and revealing. Cather’s important meeting and subsequent correspondence with the older (and much-revered) Jewett helped embolden Cather to leave her editorial position at McClure’s and focus on her own fiction. And Dreiser entered a seven-year snit when former protégé Mencken trashed An American Tragedy.
Sometimes familiar, sometimes fascinating discussion of the choreography of friendship, of the roots and routes of rivalry.Pub Date: April 25, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6045-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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