A neglected British modernist writer is resurrected in exhaustive personal detail but only partly convincing critical measure. Between the world wars, Mary Butts (18901937) wrote several esteemed works that influenced and reflected the preferences of the age, including historical fiction (Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra) and contemporary novels (The Death of Felicity Tavernier), memoir (The Crystal Cabinet), short stories, and criticism. To better understand her ``progress and achievements,'' British writer Blondel, in her first biography, takes a chronological approach and makes liberal use of Butts's diaries, which provide a centerpiece for this narrative. Revealing even more than Butts's artistic development, the chronology provides a fine composite view of a talented, manipulative, self-involved, complicated woman. She was devoted to her art, reading constantly and writing regularly; but such devotion meant she left her daughter's upbringing to others and antagonized friends and relatives with cries for money. Of a wide, odd mind, she was a student of classical history but equally interested in magic and the supernatural and finally embraced Catholicism. She overused alcohol and at points was addicted to opiates. At her death in 1937 at age 46, Butts was still important: Faber editor T.S. Eliot expressed interest in publishing a volume of her short stories. Yet now she is a literary afterthought. Why she slipped from the modernist circle- -premature death, embrace of religion, literary fashion—does not occupy Blondel, and the matter wouldn't stick if she more satisfyingly illuminated Butts's talents. Her analyses of those talents are informative (e.g., showing her use of metaphor and her sense of place), but they often do not reveal what distinguishes them as enduring. That reviewers of the day compared her work to Joyce's and Eliot's is not enough. As a sole gateway to a lost writer, this is significant for students of British modernist writing; but only more critical dialogue could establish her place in the canon. (32 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1998
ISBN: 0-929701-55-0
Page Count: 600
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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