by Kate Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2006
No fascinating new dish here, but a meat-and-potatoes biography.
A pretty streetwalker from northern England becomes a painter’s model, high-class courtesan and then mistress to Lord Nelson himself in this businesslike portrait of Emma Hamilton.
British historian Williams begins her subject’s rags-to-riches story in squalid, coal-rich Ness, near Liverpool, where Emma, née Amy Lyon, was forced in her early teens to become a servant when her alcoholic and possibly tubercular father killed himself. When she moved to London, the city’s amusements proved more compelling than scrubbing floors; her employer cast her out in the street, but her good looks and determination secured her a job at Drury Lane as a wardrobe mistress, while she moonlighted as a model for artists George Romney and Joshua Reynolds. Top-drawer brothel work followed, then stag parties hosted by aristocrats like Sir Harry of Uppark, who got her pregnant and then passed her off to Charles Grenville of Paddington. She changed her name to Emma Hart and sent for her mother to keep house for her. Once Grenville grew tired of her, she was handed off to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, who lavished her with riches and actually married her, making her a lady and favorite of aristocrats eager to wear their fashions “à la Emma.” Nuts-and-bolts prose recounts Emma’s incredible rise without a lot of razzle-dazzle: Moving to Naples, she grew close to Queen Maria Carolina and met Lord Nelson on his way through the Mediterranean to resist Napoleon’s troops in 1798. Battered, with only one eye and one arm remaining after the Battle of the Nile, the married admiral soon fell for the charming hostess, who set about cuckolding her husband and bearing Lord Nelson a child, to the delight of the press. In her debut, Williams writes sternly of her often silly protagonist, but drops the occasional feminist justification, e.g., “Despite all her charisma, intelligence, and charm, Emma had no rights and had to rely on what she could win from men.”
No fascinating new dish here, but a meat-and-potatoes biography.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46194-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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