Illuminating, but as the author himself suggests, it’s the beginning of the discussion about Murdoch’s life, not the end....
A long but selective biography that focuses on the distinguished British novelist as an expert on love, emphasizing her many affairs and intense friendships.
Briskly summarizing Murdoch’s Anglo-Irish ancestry and birth in Dublin in 1919, Conradi devotes the longest portion to the period from his subject’s years as an Oxford undergraduate through jobs as a civil servant in wartime London and as a UN refugee worker in postwar Europe, to her teaching post at Cambridge in 1947 and ’48. During those years, richly detailed through her letters and journals, Murdoch joins the Communist party and excels in her philosophy studies. She works hard, yet everything seems almost effortless to her, including maintaining close ties with her many friends. These early connections are frequently the models for her novels’ characters, though she denies the portraits are directly drawn from life. Conradi deftly weaves throughout the text an account of Murdoch’s political activism, including her complicated views on Ireland. The author loses steam a bit in the second half, when he introduces her future husband, literary critic John Bayley, whom she met around the time she was writing her first novel, Under the Net (1954). Conradi discusses Murdoch’s fiction best in terms of the relationships that influence it. And he leaves out a lot. After her school days, there is scant mention of her family, though she was close to both her parents. There is only one description of the strain her enduring marriage to Bayley might have suffered because of her extramarital attachments, lesbian and otherwise. Her illness and death from Alzheimer’s in 1999 are briefly, though movingly, touched upon. Given the fact that the author is Murdoch’s literary executor (and the book is dedicated to Bayley), it’s not too surprising that no one has a bad word for her, with the exception of one former lover, novelist Elias Canetti. It’s also true that, as Murdoch herself admitted, very few people really know her. Conradi could well be one of them.
Illuminating, but as the author himself suggests, it’s the beginning of the discussion about Murdoch’s life, not the end. (50 photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04875-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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