By the time of Tennyson’s death, a new generation of readers threatened to erode his monumental reputation. This fine...
Queen Victoria’s favorite poet gets a richly detailed new life.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1882), England’s poet laureate and one of the most famous literary figures of his time, hated biographers. He feared that after he died he would be “ripped open like a pig” by writers lusting after details of his private life. He was not wrong: Tennyson scholarship has produced volumes of his letters, books about his friends, a memoir by his son and several biographies, including one by a grandson. Batchelor (Emeritus, English/Newcastle Univ., Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2006, etc.) draws on these works and considerable new published and archival material, resulting in a well-balanced, insightful portrait of a prolific poet and a man so “strikingly handsome…splendid of face and strong of limb” that he exuded greatness—which was, indeed, Tennyson’s aim. Rising from provincial roots, he strived for acceptance by the upper class but never felt comfortable among them. His first great love was a woman too wealthy to consider him a serious suitor, and this failure haunted him forever. In his early life, Batchelor writes, Tennyson was “a man with a violent sense of entitlement, excluded, angry, ambitious.” Even when he became indisputably famous, lauded by Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning, “he needed constantly the reassurance of being feted by the rich and the great.” He also needed constant attention. His wife served as amanuensis, servant and buffer, and friends endured his long, dramatic readings, responding with the requisite admiration. Batchelor contextualizes and illuminates scores of poems, including “In Memoriam,” “The Lady of Shallott,” “Idylls of the King and Maud,” which met with criticism that wounded Tennyson deeply.
By the time of Tennyson’s death, a new generation of readers threatened to erode his monumental reputation. This fine biography revives the difficult, moody, complex man whose works captivated the Victorian world.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60598-490-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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