A long-overdue study that will surely spark new interest in Gardner’s work.
Thorough, knowledgeable, gossipy biography of a remarkable but little-celebrated American poet.
With a name shared by her eccentric aunt and patron of the arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1915–1981) found her own fame eclipsed shortly after her last collection was published, just before her death. “Eclipsed” proved the leitmotif of the younger Gardner’s life, as her monumental talent as a poet and actress was submerged under the lifelong weight of her aristocratic parentage and wealth, the stifling umbrage of four unsatisfying marriages, the exigencies of mopping up after her unstable children and the demands of her ultimately all-consuming alcoholism. Yet Gardner managed to release four collections of stunning poetry: Birthdays from the Ocean (1955), The Looking Glass (1961), West of Childhood (1965) and That Was Then (1979). She also established herself as a dogged poetry critic, especially during the four years she volunteered as manuscript reader for Poetry magazine under the tutelage of Karl Shapiro. With her marriage to Allen Tate from 1959 until 1966, Gardner became part of a sensational “literary team” whose parties were legendary. Janssen (The Kenyon Review, 1939-1970: A Critical History, 1990) ably fleshes out her subject, delving fearlessly into the rollicking, drunken complicated lives of these brilliant but troubled characters. The author answers her own questions about Gardner—“Where did she spring from, and why had she sunk into oblivion?”—by quoting extensively from her poetry and correspondence, and from those who knew her. She provides an intimate examination of this charming, intriguing, largely self-educated woman who either was sidelined by the paternal bias of the day or sabotaged her own gifts.
A long-overdue study that will surely spark new interest in Gardner’s work.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1898-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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