Slawenski, the creator of deadcaulfields.com, is an admirer, but this is no fanboy biography; his close study of Salinger’s...
Impressively researched, sympathetic critical biography of one of the 20th century’s most perplexing fiction authors.
Jerome David Salinger (1919–2010) built his literary reputation in the 1950s and ’60s on a string of short stories and a novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which artfully explored youthful precocity, social alienation and religious epiphany. Yet at the height of his fame, Salinger decided to escape the spotlight. After his story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” was published in the New Yorker in 1965, he maintained almost total public silence until his death. Consequently, Salinger acquired a second reputation as an infamously eccentric recluse, but Slawenski’s biography shows how the author’s seclusion naturally flowed out of his personal experience and metaphysical anxiety. Born to a well-off New York family, Salinger harbored literary ambitions from an early age, and though he aspired to the high-art pinnacle of the New Yorker, his early work mostly emerged in little magazines like Story or “slicks” like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Manhandling of his manuscripts by editors made Salinger skeptical about the publishing industry; a brutalizing Army experience during World War II, where he took part in the D-Day invasion, made him obsessive about the nature of man and God. Classic stories such as “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” were the product of a writer unsure of how to make his way in the world, and Slawenski patiently tracks how Salinger’s growing interest in Eastern religion meshed with an increased fastidiousness about his writing. That’s a recipe for a reclusive author, though fewer than 50 pages of the book deal with Salinger’s half-century of seclusion, dwelling little on the gossipy details that emerged in memoirs such as those by his one-time lover Joyce Maynard. In Slawenski’s reckoning, Salinger died not a cloistered misanthrope but a defiantly monklike soul—a writer so obsessed with perfecting his vision of the world that he had to abandon it to get the story right.
Slawenski, the creator of deadcaulfields.com, is an admirer, but this is no fanboy biography; his close study of Salinger’s roots admirably redirects attention to his writing and thought instead of his self-imposed exile.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6951-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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