A major biography, then, of a minor figure.
A well-considered life of the phenomenally successful but little esteemed English writer.
Pity poor W. Somerset Maugham, whose friends called him “Willie”: he complained that his manicured Riviera villa and yacht were poor places to write, “out of touch with the stream of life, with people, with happenings of import.” When he entered into that stream, he sometimes got himself into deep trouble, but also turned up material for stories that approached literature—Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge. Having achieved success early on with books that critics dismissed as potboilers, Maugham found himself outside the best literary circles; he lived to be a ripe 92, but “he developed no coterie and was sustained by no reliable faction,” and was indeed most unpopular. Literary and film biographer Meyers (Inherited Risk, 2002, etc.) enumerates the reasons for Maugham’s poor standing: he had a “chilling character,” lived abroad to avoid paying British taxes, was openly homosexual, and “enjoyed writing and composed with great facility in an age when highly admired authors, like Joyce and Kafka, tortured themselves with creative agony.” The last reason seems a little unlikely; like Stephen King and the National Book Award, after all, Maugham got his honors and his moolah too, a million dollars for the play Rain and its subsequent adaptations alone. But it finds echoes in critical assessments of the time, which accused Maugham of emotional tone-deafness and general hackishness. Meyers turns in a respectful account of Maugham, delivering a few nicely turned surprises that touch on, for instance, Maugham’s service as a spy in the South Seas and early Bolshevik Russia. All that doesn’t make the writer any more likable (as Meyers quotes C.P. Snow as observing, visiting Maugham was “rather like visiting one’s family lawyer”), but such moments at least make him seem more interesting.
A major biography, then, of a minor figure.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41475-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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