Finding the relationship between the life and the art is one of the major challenges to a biographer of Trollope. As editor of the collected works (62 volumes including 47 novels) and the letters, Hall (English/Bronx Community College) may be one of the few scholars to have read all of them. He concludes that the vulgar, outspoken, quarrelsome persona of the real Trollope was as much an invention as the narrative voices in the novels, a mask to protect the tenderhearted, lonely little boy who survived in the ursine body of the adult. Unlike that of Dickens, Trollope's wretched childhood never enters his novels. One of seven children, all but two of whom died in childhood, he was neglected by his penniless father and his flighty mother. Unpopular and inept as a day student at Harrow, Trollope left school to work for the post office at age 19, married, fathered two sons, and published his first novel at age 32. Between 1859 and 1867, when he retired from the p.o. as an executive, he traveled to Egypt, Australia, and the US, then settled near London to enjoy life as literary gentleman. He entertained, hunted, attended London clubs, and wrote for three hours a day, every day, starting at 5:30 A.M., 25 words every 15 minutes. His productivity, his disciplined and methodical approach, and his self-deprecating belief that writing is a craft comparable to shoemaking led others to question his status as an artist. Even his familiar topic seemed uninspired: the romance of everyday life among the middle and upper classes, focusing on the nuances of feeling and conscience that the stormy, impulsive Trollope seemed incapable of. But in the fictions of the Barchester series and the Pallisers, Trollope vindicated himself, providing models of loyalty and friendship, manners and values for the very classes that had rejected him as a child. Clear, direct, cautious, respectful: a useful companion to the more interesting novels and letters—but between the masks and the fictions, the real Trollope is yet to be discovered. (Twenty-seven illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-19-812627-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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
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