From the ordinary clay of words, Martin sculpts an impressive image of an extraordinary man.
Reliable, readable life of 18th-century England’s most celebrated intellectual, lexicographer, poet, critic, biographer, essayist, Tory, travel writer and—perhaps most of all—Personality.
Few writers can approach Johnson (1709–84) more surely than Martin, biographer of the Great Man’s own famous biographer (A Life of James Boswell, 2000, etc.). He does so in conventional fashion, beginning with a sketch of Johnson’s hometown, Lichfield, and ending with the funeral and burial, discussing intervening events more or less chronologically. There are few surprises. Martin does argue that Johnson was, perhaps, not so adamantine a Tory as others have portrayed him, more than once declaring that it’s unproductive and inaccurate to view Whig v. Tory as a simplistic struggle merely mirroring today’s Right v. Left. Yet he acknowledges that Johnson strongly opposed U.S. independence (famously dismissing the principal American champions of freedom as “drivers of Negroes”), accepted a pension from George III and enjoyed the honorary Oxford doctorate arranged by a grateful government when he published a pamphlet attacking the American rebels’ position on taxation. Politics aside, Martin ably shows us the enormous depths of Johnson’s humanity. He was hideously scarred by scrofula, nearly blind, subject to violent twitching that suggests Tourette’s, big and clumsy and taurine, often unkempt and always impecunious. Yet Johnson nonetheless married (with uneven result), had devoted friends (to whom he was fiercely devoted), opened his home to those in need, enjoyed the company of the famous (Joshua Reynolds, hometown buddy David Garrick) but also the unknown. He battled melancholy continually, railed against his own sometimes dilatory ways, yet when ready to work was immensely productive in a very short time, his pen flashing across the page, his mind remembering the vast libraries he’d read, his imagination soaring where few had ever gone, or ever will go, not least of all in the astonishing Dictionary.
From the ordinary clay of words, Martin sculpts an impressive image of an extraordinary man.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-674-03160-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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