by Lyle Leverich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1995
Artistically and psychologically acute biography of the great American poet-playwright. Tennessee Williams (191183) named theatrical producer Leverich his authorized biographer in 1979, but a hostile executor of the estate blocked his work's publication until her death in 1994. First in a projected two volumes, this thoughtful assessment seems only to have benefited from the enforced wait: The novice author has ably organized well-known facts about Thomas Lanier Williams III's early years and provided a refreshingly in-depth perspective on the apprenticeship that ended in 1945 with the triumphant New York premiere of The Glass Menagerie, the first mature work of self-christened playwright Tennessee Williams. A complex, three-dimensional portrait emerges, far superior to previous shallow efforts by Donald Spoto and Ronald Hayman. Leverich identifies the principal conflict of Williams's life as the battle between his puritan and pagan instincts, a split reflected in his plays' central theme of the sensitive, artistic soul battered by a materialistic world and in his lifelong fear that he would go insane, like his beloved sister, Rose. Leverich places the writer's homosexuality in context, acknowledging it as a fundamental aspect of his personality but avoiding other biographers' tendency to make it the sole wellspring of his art, which Leverich convincingly argues owed at least as much to such literary influences as D.H. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, and Hart Crane. The book has some faults: Its clearly defined main themes are repetitiously reiterated, and some judgments seem simplistic, such as the idea that ``Tom'' and ``Tennessee'' were always at odds and the contention that the writer never recovered from his inability to win his disapproving father's love. Leverich's serviceable prose could use a little of Williams's lyrical eloquence, but he nearly equals his subject in compassion and understanding of the tangled human heart. Affectionate and affecting, dense with arresting detail, likely to be definitive. (50 b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 50,000; first serial to the New Yorker)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-70225-8
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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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