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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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