A tendentious but relentlessly thorough, historically important treatment.
With the cooperation of his subject’s daughter, Sunday Times chief book reviewer Carey (What Good Are the Arts?, 2006, etc.) produces the first major biography of Nobel Prize–winning novelist William Golding (1911–1993).
The author is uniquely equipped to handle the task. He was the first person allowed access to Golding’s immense archive of letters, journals and drafts, and he also knew Golding personally, having edited a Festschrift for his 75th birthday. The amount of detail is impressive, even staggering. After an unhappy career at Oxford and a stint in the Royal Navy during World War II, Golding became, like his father, a dissatisfied schoolteacher. He published several novels, including Lord of the Flies (his first book) in 1954, while laboring over class preparations and student essays. Literary celebrity finally freed him from his bondage in the classroom. Carey ably chronicles Golding’s career-long relationship with Faber and Faber and editor Charles Monteith, and he describes Golding’s long marriage, which was lubricated with alcohol, animated by world travel and punctuated by arguments, even violence. The author portrays an insecure Golding who revised ferociously but disdained research, often preferring the visions in his imagination to the inconvenience of fact. Although he professed to dislike publicity and fame, Golding reveled in it as well, accepting countless speaking engagements and tours all over the world, as well as numerous awards and honorary degrees. Despite Carey’s enormous scholarship and access, however, much of this massive volume slips into hagiography. He invariably portrays Golding in the most positive way possible, dragging even the novelist’s darkest demons—excessive drink, possible spousal abuse—into a forgiving if not flattering light.
A tendentious but relentlessly thorough, historically important treatment.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8732-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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