by Kathy Chamberlain ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2017
A delightful book about the early stirrings of feminism in Victorian England and a celebration of the lost art of letter...
A biography of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-1866), the wife of essayist Thomas known for her “marvelous letters.”
A longtime professor at the City University of New York, Chamberlain has lectured and published numerous essays on Carlyle, widely regarded as one of England’s great masters of the epistolary, a literary form of writing as much confessional as novelistic. Her letters—and her strong instructions to correspondents—insist that one must relate not only events, but also their effects. She believed that good letter writing involved a “splash of the mind,” something like speaking. Encouraged by friends to pen a novel, she preferred her correspondence. Chamberlain traces her subject’s lifelong quest to make a mark beyond the wifely duties of a Victorian wife. She worked tirelessly, through her many acquaintances, to help find work for unemployed women, and her husband’s growing reputation as a writer brought all the brightest minds across their path: Dickens, Emerson, Thackeray, Margaret Fuller, Erasmus Darwin, and Giuseppe Mazzini, to name a few. One other acquaintance caused considerable trouble in their marriage: Lady Harriet Baring, with whom Thomas enjoyed a long, reportedly platonic relationship. Thomas, a patronizing, infantilizing husband, subjected Jane’s jealousy to what the author terms “gaslighting.” He was an influential Victorian literary figure but also a chauvinist who condemned abolitionists and derided blacks. Jane also found a place for German writer Amely Bölte as governess to a truly horrid child, whom the author points out would become a “three volume novel of a little charge,” as well as the basis for Thackeray’s cynical character in Vanity Fair Becky Sharp. Chamberlain’s literary skills serve to showcase her expertise on a woman whom history has undeservedly ignored.
A delightful book about the early stirrings of feminism in Victorian England and a celebration of the lost art of letter writing.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1420-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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 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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