This year's newest contribution to the Bloomsbury collection is another rather lugubrious biography of Virginia Woolf, with special attention paid to her relationships with the painter and critic Roger Fry and her artist sister, Vanessa Bell. ``How on earth does one explain madness and love in sober prose with dates attached?'' Woolf asked in her diary, while at work on her biography of Fry. Woolf's own biographers have had even more trouble with her tragic life, and Reid (English/Louisiana State Univ.) lurches with leaden pedantry through her interpretation of Woolf's unhappy family relations, Bloomsbury associations, mental illness, and artistic drive. With the biographic facts essentially known but still open to interpretation, Reid forgoes the Oedipal complex some previous biographers have attributed to Woolf's relations with her industriously literary, eminently Victorian father, Leslie Stephen. Instead, she focuses on Woolf's estrangement from her compulsively self-sacrificing and distant mother, Julia, and her sibling rivalry with her sister. Sometimes nearly villainizing Vanessa Bell, Reid casts her both as an artistic competitor and an unreliable mother- substitute, who helped take charge of Virginia during her first suicide attempt and, Reid argues, precipitated her last, successful one. Even when lengthily recounting Virginia's innocent (for Bloomsbury) but indiscreet flirtation with Vanessa's husband, Clive Bell, Reid can still rap Vanessa for insensitivity. Roger Fry displaces Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West as the central figure in Woolf's life as both friend and aesthetic cohort, illuminating the way in which Virginia took inspiration from Modernist painting for her literary experiments. Otherwise, though, Reid treats Woolf's literary drive as largely an emotional defense (against her siblings), attention-getter (with her parents), and inevitably, therapy, with all the latest ``enabling'' jargon. Despite her tracing of the more interesting theme of writing vs. painting in Woolf's life, Reid's try for psychological insight here often reads like a psychiatrist's report. (60 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-19-510195-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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