by Joan Schenkar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 2009
A comprehensive, nuanced evaluation of Highsmith Country.
Exhaustive study of the much-loathed suspense writer best known for the Ripley novels and Strangers on a Train.
Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) generated distaste in many contemporaries for a variety of reasons, including her alcoholism, racism, anti-Semitism and her tendency to give friendship tokens then demand them back. As playwright and biographer Schenkar writes, she was mean, cruel and sexually rapacious with women and a few men. The author traces Highsmith’s corrosive behavior to her supreme hatred of her stepfather, whom her mother promised to divorce, then reneged on. Along the way, she damaged most of her relationships, facts well documented in dozens of journals, diaries, short-story collections, massive correspondence and endless lists now housed in the Swiss Literary Archives in Berne, which Schenkar had access to. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Highsmith’s family relocated to New York, where she graduated from Barnard, began reading Dostoyevsky and started submitting manuscripts to the New Yorker, which continually rejected them. She then spent eight years writing plot arcs for Timely Comics before penning Strangers in 1950, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock a year later. She used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, for her second book, The Price of Salt (1952), a lesbian romance that became an underground hit. In 1955, Highsmith published the first of the five books featuring the criminal hero Tom Ripley. Holding to an eight-page-per-day writing schedule, which she maintained for most of her life, Highsmith incorporated her obsessions into her work. She kept 300 snails, for instance, because she liked to watch them copulate, and they show up in Deep Water (1957). Her snobbishness, homosexual undercurrent and love/hate relationship with America are omnipresent. Schenkar makes the case that Highsmith was most comfortable when she was herself uncomfortable, living in cold, dark houses throughout Europe where she never mastered the native languages, or was virulently alienating lovers, editors and most particularly her mother. She died alone, by choice, in Switzerland in 1995.
A comprehensive, nuanced evaluation of Highsmith Country.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-30375-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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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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