The thesis of this meticulous and admiring biography is that Yourcenar (b. Crayencour, 1903-87) was both inventor and invention, creating her life along with her fiction. Savigneau (literary editor for Le Monde) struggles to establish the facts in a life of artful illusion. Inventing a pseudonym (an anagram of her given name) was for Yourcenar one more gesture of freedom from a childhood of losses that began with the death of her mother (while giving birth to Yourcenar) and that went on to include the loss of both a beloved nursemaid and of her country and home during WW I: a childhood spent with a wealthy and devoted but profligate and aging father. Yourcenar began and ended her life with love affairs with men who were much younger than herself—men who preferred other men—but she spent 40 years with a woman, Grace Frick, in a relationship so consuming that Yourcenar gave up her beloved France to live in America, among people she considered ``without civilization.'' With no formal education, Yourcenar taught beginning French at Sarah Lawrence and found acclaim in the publication of her novel The Memoirs of Hadrian (1952). Much of Savigneau's study consists of the mundane: domestic arrangements (including shopping lists) at the Maine summer house that Yourcenar shared with Frick; Yourcenar's travels, lectures, and habits of composition. The most interesting passages detail the objections of AcadÇmie Franáaise members to the nomination (and eventual election) of Yourcenar as its first woman member: ``What would she wear?'' one asked. Yourcenar mingled with no notable writers, it seems, and participated in none of the artistic ferment of her period in either Paris or New York. To control her own history, to avoid being the ``prey'' of biographers, Yourcenar left masses of well-organized papers—but she concealed those that may have answered the question that Savigneau raises without—despite her diligence—answering: What made Yourcenar a ``star,'' a ``myth,'' a ``legend''? (Fifty halftones)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-226-73544-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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