Zola had a knack for turbulence, both in his fiction and in his personal life. This lively account documents one of the most...
A chronicle of Émile Zola’s exile in England after the novelist’s involvement in the Dreyfus affair.
In 1894, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of passing military secrets to Germany, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to prison on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Four years later, Zola argued for Dreyfus’ innocence in “J’Accuse,” an open letter to France’s prime minister that was published on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore. Zola not only claimed that Dreyfus, who was Jewish, couldn’t have passed along the secrets, but he also accused the French army and government of corruption and anti-Semitism. When Zola was convicted of libel, fined 3,000 francs, and sentenced to a year in prison, he fled to a series of locations in London and the English countryside. In this well-researched history, Rosen (Children’s Literature/Goldsmiths, Univ. of London; What is Poetry?: The Essential Guide to Reading and Writing Poems, 2016, etc.), a British poet, broadcaster, and former Children’s Laureate, documents Zola’s activities while in England, which included working on the novel Fécondité, indulging his passion for photography, and, most painfully, writing home. Zola left behind his wife, Alexandrine, and his mistress, Jeanne Rozerot, the mother of his two young children, Jacques and Denise. Rosen draws from many sources, including the adult Denise’s memoirs and Zola’s many letters home, in which he expresses concerns over Jacques’ osseous tuberculosis and laments that he and Jeanne won’t be together for their 10th anniversary. Rosen digresses too often with unnecessary details about Zola’s family life, but the book is still a thoughtful examination of anti-Semitism and French jurisprudence in the late 19th-century. The author also tells his story with great wit, as when he writes that Zola cycled through villages so perfectly neat that he “wondered where the English hid their poor people.”
Zola had a knack for turbulence, both in his fiction and in his personal life. This lively account documents one of the most turbulent and consequential episodes of all.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-516-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
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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