A sharp, entertaining literary biography that encompasses plenty despite its narrow focus.
A perceptive study of how Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) emerged from middle-class beginnings to inhabit the tony corridors described in Brideshead Revisited (1945).
By the time of his death, Waugh had been dismissed as a pretentious snob whose best days were long behind him. Byrne (Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson, 2005, etc.) seeks to redeem her subject, and she makes her job easier by focusing the narrative almost entirely on Waugh’s best-known work. It makes for an incomplete biography, but Byrne more than compensates with a close reading of his defining experiences as a bisexual, a Catholic and especially as a young man eager to explore the upper class. At Oxford he fell into the orbit of a number of students born into wealth, and his time at college seemed more dedicated to heavy drinking and sexual experimentation than any formal learning. Among his peers was Hugh Lygon, the son of Lord Beauchamp, patriarch of Madresfield (aka “Mad”), the lavish estate that would serve as the model for Brideshead. The Lygons were abundantly wealthy but hardly trouble-free. Hugh eventually sank into a deep alcoholism, and Beauchamp was forced to leave England after his affairs with young men came to light. (Byrne is the first to see a divorce petition that describes his dalliances with young servants.) Regardless, Waugh struck up a close friendship with two of Hugh’s sisters, Maimie and Coote, who supported him through his writing career and failed romances. The author was seduced and inspired by Mad’s opulence, but Byrne doesn’t paint him as an opportunistic hanger-on—his affection for Beauchamp and the Lygon sisters was deep and respectful. Quoted letters capture the depth of their relationship, down to the private slang. Though Byrne’s exploration of Waugh’s Catholic faith is relatively slight, she smartly exposes how much it informed Brideshead and how much of the Lygons’ internal turmoil thrummed within the novel.
A sharp, entertaining literary biography that encompasses plenty despite its narrow focus.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-088130-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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