Unsettling and absorbing.
Multilayered memoir chronicles a young woman’s growth into adulthood, probing the ethics of adultery and portraying an enviable, mature marriage.
Darling was a fledgling Washington Post reporter when she met acclaimed journalist Lee Lescaze. He was married, but that didn’t stop the two from beginning a torrid affair. When Lescaze’s wife found a card she had sent him, Darling wavered a little bit, wanting to tell her lover, “I am a thirty-year-old girl with the moral depth of a dragonfly, and you would be crazy to do anything that connected your happiness to mine.” Nonetheless, he got a divorce and moved in with her. The familiar staples (verging on clichés) of the affair-and-remarriage genre are here: Before Lescaze left his wife, Darling wondered what it would be like to date someone with whom she could be seen in public; afterwards, she desperately tried to get his kids to like her. The real strength of this account is its depiction of the lovers’ eventual marriage. Together, they struggled with the death of Lescaze’s son, then with his own fatal cancer. The most insightful chapter details their first year of marriage. With tender pathos, Darling describes becoming “really married,” the process through which “our initial idea of romance yielded reluctantly to the reality of daily life.” Since their relationship had begun as an affair, this transition from the romantic to the quotidian was especially fraught; Darling could no longer define herself as the exciting vixen who would rescue Lescaze from the dull drudgery of his first marriage. Anyone who is married will laugh with Darling as she describes the disappointment she felt when her new hubby gave her towels for Valentine’s Day, and underline her many insights into the “cycles [of] domestic life.”
Unsettling and absorbing.Pub Date: March 27, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-33606-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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