A perceptive, readable work of Laurentiana, though perhaps too late in its own right.
Well-crafted life of the once-famous (or infamous) writer who got much mileage out of shocking the bourgeoisie.
“How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life,” David Herbert Lawrence grumbled, late in his short life. “How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price-list.” Lawrence was the uncommon product of all-too-common stock, the child of an impoverished coal miner whose wife was certain that she had married beneath her station and instilled in Lawrence a recognition of the war between the sexes. He took that war all too literally, it seems; some of the more unpleasant moments of literary scholar Worthen’s careful biography concern Lawrence’s habit of hitting his partner in scandal, Frieda, and otherwise demeaning her (“ ‘Pull in your belly, you big bitch,’ an acquaintance was shocked to hear him say,” and that wasn’t the worst of it). Such moments do nothing to brighten Lawrence’s reputation when few people now read him anyway; “his reputation has fallen in the literary and academic worlds which, in the middle of the twentieth century, treated him as a great writer,” Worthen laments, adding that Lawrence is regularly suspected of being racist, sexist and fascist—but neglecting the possibility that modern readers might just find him musty, revolutionary though some of his work was in its time. For all the unpleasantness and, perhaps, minor status of his subject, however, Worthen does a fine job of reconstructing events in a timeline punctuated by the Lawrences’ roaming from one work-conducive backwater to another—Lake Como, Guadalajara, Santa Fe—only to have the rest of the world discover them in their wake, making such places unaffordable until Lawrence, near death, finally brought in enough income from the sale of his books to go where he wished, too late.
A perceptive, readable work of Laurentiana, though perhaps too late in its own right.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-341-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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
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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