A well-researched, engrossing history and critique of biographies about women. After publishing Sylvia Plath, A Biography (not reviewed), Wagner-Martin (English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of North Carolina) found herself ``bewildered and then amazed at the lambasting'' some British reviewers gave her book. Compelled to understand this criticism, Wagner-Martin attempts here to delineate why writing about women's lives has become ``a dangerous cultural and literary project.'' In probing the differences between biographies about men and women, she analyzes the unique difficulties faced by the biographers of women. Biographies, she asserts, are a traditionally male domain because comparatively few women have had the kind of success that attracts notice. And because fewer women have lived public lives, women's biographies are more often based on private events. It is the centrality of these private events that creates problems for traditional biographers. ``If a woman is promiscuous,'' asks Wagner-Martin, ``what kind of response will readers have to this aspect of her existence?'' A biographer who acknowledges the lesbian relationships of Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Margaret Mead has to risk alienating certain readers who chauvinistically hold women up to different moral standards. Postfeminist women biographers of the past 30 years, on the other hand, are seen as changing the parameters of biography to focus far more on the internal lives of their subjects. In the course of examining these questions, Wagner-Martin also delves into other interesting areas, such as the ethical issues biographers face (what to reveal and what to conceal) and gender stereotypes about ``what a good, moral woman should be.'' An extensive bibliography appends the text. A significant and provocative contribution to postfeminist literary criticism. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 8, 1994
ISBN: 0-8135-2092-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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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