A reverential biography that presumes rather than inquires into Emerson's greatness. Richardson (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, not reviewed) offers a readable, well-researched account of Emerson's life journey: education at Harvard; work as a teacher, minister, lyceum lecturer, and essayist; marriages to Ellen Tucker and Lydia (renamed Lidian) Jackson; travels, notably his first trip to Europe, when he met Samuel Coleridge, Jane and Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth, and his second, when the Revolutions of 1848 gave him ``an important lesson in politics''; and relationships with friends and relatives, including Mary Moody Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. Even as he lays out these relationships, however, Richardson undermines the assumption that Emerson might owe a significant debt to some of his sources by reducing all people, books, and events to things on which the Sage exercised his ``genius for skimming.'' Although the brief preface ambitiously promises a ``portrait of the whole man,'' this is a promise the book cannot meet; in fact, it merely makes more evident the portrait's intriguing lacunae. What kind of husband, for example, was the man who wrote to Lidian in August 1843, ``I wish I had never been born. I do not see how God can compensate me for this sort of existence''? Richardson observes that later in life the chronically sickly Lidian took a turn for the better, and ``as Emerson's powers and energies declined...those of Lidian revived...Emerson's decline made room for Lidian.'' Unfortunately, this glancing allusion refers to an intriguing pattern we could fully understand only if we knew more about either husband or wife or both. Worthwhile, though excessively careful not to knock any chips from the Great One's pedestal. (21 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-520-08808-5
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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