Trying to hunt down the controversial, complex Greene (190491) as the Harry Lime of the literary racket, Shelden (Orwell, 1991, etc.) succeeds less in decoding the deceptions of Greene's life than in creating a trail of false leads. In contrast to the meticulous Norman Sherry's multi-volume authorized biography (The Life of Graham Greene: Vol. II, 1995, etc.), Shelden not only braves the protective Greene estate, but also rummages for unreliable rumors and sloppily sourced gossip. Greene's penchant for prostitutes, his friendship with double agent Kim Philby, his provocative loose-cannon politics, and his heterodox (rather antinomian) Catholicism all entangled his enigmatic life; but Shelden adds unsupported claims of homosexuality and pedophilia, opportunistic political posturing, and religious hypocrisy to make Greene as villainous a character as any in his novels. Shelden uses such unreliable witnesses as a Jamaican maid, a Capri postal worker, and the batty model for Aunt Augusta of Travels with My Aunt, and his own cases for an adolescent botched suicide attempt by hanging and an affair with a fellow Oxford man have scarcely more credibility. Given Greene's highly dubious character, some of Shelden's barbs hook flesh, from habitual spitefulness and petty deceptions—such as the publication of the ``lost novel'' The Tenth Man—to more serious sins. Shelden uncovers an early anti-Semitic streak, which surfaced in Greene's 1930s movie reviews of the ``tasteless Semitic opulence'' of producer Alexander Korda. In his last years, Greene conducted all-expenses-paid political liaisons with Panamanian dictators General Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, and the Sandinistas— which led to his puff personality piece Getting to Know the General, especially disappointing in comparison with his famously penetrating earlier tours of Mexico and Vietnam. Despite Shelden's relentless animus for Greene as a person and a writer, this propaganda campaign can neither surpass nor subvert the Greene legend. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42883-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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