A useful addition to the growing body of critical studies of Peake.
An absorbing portrait of the dystopian, sometimes dyspeptic English author and illustrator.
Mervyn Peake (1911–68) is best known for his Gormenghast novels, the basis for a recent BBC television series. He is less known for his superb drawings and paintings, examples of which appear throughout this well-written biography. According to Yorke, who has written similar studies of other relatively obscure English artists, Peake led an almost stereotypically Edwardian childhood. Born in China to missionary parents, he endured public school (“He played for the Chalmers House first cricket XI between 1925 and 1928, but, according to the school magazine, ‘at the present is much too careless’ ”) and came of age in the depths of the Depression. After a bohemian period that included time in an artists’ colony on the island of Sark, Peake found work as an art teacher in London, where he fell in love with one of his students. Though Maeve Gilmore’s family opposed the union, the couple married and enjoyed a happy life together. Peake continued to work as an artist, securing commissions to illustrate children’s books and classics while working throughout the early 1940s on a novel called Titus Groan, which would become the first installment of the Gormenghast series. (Fans will appreciate learning that the novel does not take its name, as is often supposed, from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: “People forget that one of Peake’s favorite artists was Rembrandt, whose only son was called Titus.”) Discharged from the army on grounds of ill-health during WWII, Peake was sent to document the liberated Bergen-Belsen, where he made a haunting study of a girl dying of consumption. Afterward, Yorke writes, a gloom settled over Peake’s writings and drawings—but not necessarily the artist himself—that lasted until his death from Parkinson’s disease 20 years later.
A useful addition to the growing body of critical studies of Peake.Pub Date: June 22, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-211-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
