The reader craves more than a polite scratch at the literary myth.
British journalist Chaney offers a spirited life of the creator of Peter Pan.
Barrie, about whom Conan Doyle noted, “There is nothing small except his body,” was born in the Scottish weaving town of Kirriemuir in 1860, the ninth child of educated Protestants. He set out to make his journalistic mark in London and immediately began to publish “Auld Licht Idylls” for the St. James Gazette and others. With friends in George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, Barrie grew into a writer with serious purpose, trying his hand at novels, and “troubled, sometimes frightened, by his constant inclination to become someone else.” Lured to the theater, he wrote successful plays such as Ibsen’s Ghost and Walker, London, and he married the star actress Mary Ansell, a union that would remain childless and end in divorce. An intimate friendship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, her husband Arthur and their increasing brood led to his momentous creation of Peter Pan (1904): Barrie’s perceived perfect family became the Darlings. The play made Barrie rich but rather isolated by his transatlantic success, especially after the deaths of Arthur and Sylvia. Chaney does an admirable job of chronicling Barrie’s busy goings-ons, yet does not get at the heart of the man except perhaps to note that he preferred fantasy to reality. His later years were absorbed somberly by cares for the Davies’ sons and a touching friendship with the married Lady Cynthia Asquith. Chaney briefly delves into Barrie’s significance within the golden age of British children’s literature, although unlike other great writers for children, such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, he refused to acknowledge time and negotiate adulthood. While Chaney’s historical overview of Scotland at the time of the Industrial Revolution is perspicacious, her treatment of Barrie’s childhood and relationship to his mother are cursory and timid. In an endnote, the author acknowledges grudgingly that “psychoanalysis has discovered Barrie,” and cites more scathing studies.
The reader craves more than a polite scratch at the literary myth.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35779-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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