Limns the public man rather than delving too deeply inward.
Breezy, proficient biography of the versatile English novelist, journalist, and critic, by former TLS editor Treglown (Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green, 2001, etc.).
A mostly self-taught writer whose life spanned the 20th century, Pritchett (1900–97) had an enormous influence on his contemporaries, especially with his travel writing from Ireland and Spain and his probing literary criticism. He was born to a working-class family in Ipswich; his charming rogue father, a Christian Scientist, was always evading creditors, and his mother was emotionally fragile. After a stint at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich, Pritchett honed his craft largely by experience, moving from an early job sorting skins at the docks at Bermondsey (Nothing Like Leather) to working in Paris as a glue salesman, then as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, which took him to Ireland (Clare Drummer), Spain (Marching Spain), then Boston. “A small man with big appetites,” he was driven and prolific, constantly writing short stories in between doing journalism in order to support his growing family: his first marriage ended in divorce, while his second to Dorothy Roberts endured happily for the rest of his life, resulting in epistolary exuberance and several children. Gradually, Pritchett came to accept he wasn’t primarily a novelist, and during WWII his essays for the New Statesman and his more than 80 talks for the BBC provided his audience with a literary education. The success of his last novel, Mr. Beluncle (1951), a hilarious and sorrowful take on ordinariness, led to travel to America, writing for publications such as The New Yorker, and later work for PEN. Treglown has conducted innumerable interviews to flesh out his subject; however, Sir Victor’s massive work receives glancing explication, especially the latter biographies of Balzac, Turgenev, and Chekhov.
Limns the public man rather than delving too deeply inward.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50853-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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