An amiable and perhaps charitable portrait of the self- proclaimed grandmother of the modern movement. Although it's impossible to write a life of Gertrude Stein (18741946) without mentioning her famous Paris salon and her many well-known friends, Wagner-Martin (Telling Women's Lives, 1994, etc.) does an excellent job here of downplaying those more hackneyed aspects of Stein's existence. The author instead focuses on Stein's complex personality and relationships, especially those with her immediate family members and her longtime partner, Alice B. Toklas. The author begins with Stein's early years as the youngest of five children in an upwardly mobile American- Jewish family in Oakland, Calif.; her time abroad as a very young girl; the early trauma of her mother's death from cancer; and her father's domineering personality. By age 16, Stein was an orphan, and she looked to her eldest sibling, Michael, as a surrogate parent. Michael was a pillar of financial and emotional security for the family—especially the two youngest, Leo and Gertrude. After several years in school in the east, Gertrude and Leo—and later Michael and wife Sally—moved to Paris, where they became collectors of avant-garde art and artists. Stein began writing and, in 1907, met Toklas—two events that were catalysts in her breakup with Leo. Wagner-Martin describes the split well but cannot adequately explain how the formerly inseparable siblings could have had no contact for the last 25 years of their lives. Nor does she fully elucidate Stein's complex relationship with Toklas, or why the two Jewish Americans remained in Vichy France during WW II. The author does convey well, however, Stein's near-obsessive need for recognition and fame—or gloire—which she finally achieved, in 1933, with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Not the innovative work the author claims, but clear, lively, and comprehensive.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8135-2169-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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