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ANDRÉ MALRAUX

MAN'S FATE, MAN'S HOPE

Meticulously detailed yet disappointing biography of the French activist/art authority/novelist/politician who began his career by trying to smuggle Khmer sculptures out of Indochina and ended up as minister of culture under de Gaulle's Fifth Republic. In the intervening years, Malraux helped establish an anticolonialist newspaper in Saigon, got to know the Communist cadre in China (about whom he wrote in his novel Man's Fate), led an air squadron during the Spanish Civil War (the source of Man's Hope), and was an important member of the French Maquis during WW II. Plenty of colorful raw material, then, but despite his piling up of facts, Murphy, a former staff member of The Economist, is unable to bring his protagonist to life. Part of the problem seems to lie in Malraux's character itself. Cold, egocentric, domineering, he refused to let the outside world penetrate beneath his chilly facade. Even the four major women in his life—Claire, his first wife; Josette, who bore him two sons out of wedlock; Madeleine, his brother's widow, whom he married after the war; and Louise de Vilmorin, his aristocratic mistress during his final years—seem to have been held at arm's distance. The closest Malraux appears to have come to a deep emotional involvement was with de Gaulle. Ironically, it was this attachment that led to Malraux's being vilified as a reactionary during the student riots of 1968. Murphy does provide some interesting insights, however: His analysis of Malraux's growing disillusionment with the Communist cause during the Spanish Civil War is sensitive and convincing, and an anecdote concerning the French minister's being invited to Washington to consult with US officials before Richard Nixon's first trip to China is intriguing (Henry Kissinger found Malraux's opinions hopelessly out-of-date). Heavy on the whos, whats, whens, and wheres; much too light on the whys. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-8021-1033-9

Page Count: 752

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: April 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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