After a long stretch of portentous yet limp throat-clearing, novelist Delbanco (Sherbrookes, etc.) offers the slim substance here: three small, chatty studies in literary "collegiality"—all of them involving writers who lived in the same area of England (Kent and East Sussex) around 1900. ("They drawl and carry pistols and flourish their umbrellas or their walking sticks. They will change the face of fiction in our time.") First come the last days of American wonder-boy and fun-loving host Stephen Crane—and how the others reacted to his early demise: Delbanco argues (not very persuasively) that, contra Leon Edel, Henry James did probably agonize over Crane's death; he suggests that Ford Madox Ford be given "the benefit of the doubt" re his purplish recollections of Crane; he celebrates the intense Crane/Conrad friendship; and he finally ponders Crane's artistic decline, ending up on a characteristically blurry note. ("Had he recovered, so might have the prose.") Then there's another look at the much-chronicled Conrad/Ford collaborations, with brief analysis of the different degrees of collaboration (re "Amy Foster," Nostromo, and Romance) and consideration of the partnership's influence on both writers' later work; Delbanco contends that "If Conrad gained in fluency while working on Romance, Ford learned profluence"—and that "Ford released the elder man to create profound scenarios by helping him to realize the surface of his texts." And, finally, there's the unlikely acquaintanceship of James and H. G. Wells ("It is as if Borges and Jimmy Breslin met for cocktails weekly")—a relationship that soon deteriorated into condescension from James and cruel parodies from Wells; yet here again Delbanco is determined to accentuate the positive, asserting that "What seems exceptional here is that Wells and James were close—not that they disagreed." Throughout, in fact, Delbanco leans on his Pollyanna-ish view of writer interaction so hard (especially in a goopy epilogue) that even his soundly-based points become suspect. And the sense of woolly-mindedness is compounded by the prose, which is slangy yet stuffy, with clichÉs running free ("forest for the trees," "with a grain of salt," "worth his salt," etc., etc.). All in all: familia material, sketchy—and unconvincingly didactic—treatment.
Pub Date: April 16, 1982
ISBN: 0881845841
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1982
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
