by Linda Stratmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 2013
While formal and academic, this portrait presents compelling new evidence of Queensberry’s humanity.
A straightforward attempt to rehabilitate Oscar Wilde’s tormentor as a family man.
British author and crime novelist Stratmann (Greater London Murders, 2010, etc.) certainly fleshes out this highly vilified character and father to Lord Alfred Douglas, aka Bosie, Wilde’s lover. Indeed, much of what we know about the ninth Marquess of Queensberry has been learned from his contradictory and “self-justifying” son or other unreliable sources. Was Queensberry’s vindictive pursuit of Wilde an understandable expression of paternal protectiveness, or was it an outgrowth of an insidious genetic instability that can be traced to a mad distant cousin? The Queensberry inheritance meant that, at age 14, with the sudden death of his father, the eldest son was set to inherit enormous wealth and vast land in Scotland and England. Queensberry became a naval cadet whose passions, as they had been for his father, were sports and gambling. Yet another trauma occurred at age 21, when he received news that his beloved brother had died in a climbing accident; shortly after, Queensberry married the beautiful Sibyl Montgomery, and though the match yielded children, the parents were disastrously incompatible. Strong-willed to the point of being obsessive, a freethinker ostracized by his peers in Parliament for his outspoken embrace of agnosticism and regarded as somewhat of a crackpot, Queensberry became alarmed at the company kept by his spoiled, imperious third son, Bosie, namely his “unusual friendship” with the notorious Wilde. Indeed, the author deems Bosie a rather worse influence on the elder poet, a lethal mixture of both his parents, who introduced Wilde to the low-class youths that would bring about his downfall.
While formal and academic, this portrait presents compelling new evidence of Queensberry’s humanity.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-17380-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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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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