Eade offers up a softer portrait of Waugh that might help bring him some new readers, which he deserves.
A softer, kinder, gentler Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966).
Since there are already numerous biographies of Waugh, is there need for another? Englishman Eade (Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters, 2014, etc.) thinks so. For one thing, it’s the 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death; for another, Eade accessed some previously unavailable key primary resources. One is an unpublished memoir by Eade’s first wife, Evelyn (friends called her “Shevelyn”). After knowing her for a few months, Waugh proposed with the line: “Let’s get married and see how it goes.” The other was a large cache of letters from a young woman, Teresa, with whom Waugh had an affair in the 1930s. Waugh was a prolific writer of stories, novels, and travel books. Though he is better known in England than in the United States, two of his novels—Brideshead Revisited, which he called his “magnum opus,” and The Loved One, which he described as a “study of the Anglo-American cultural impasse with the mortuary as a jolly setting”—have earned him a readership in America. Early on, writes Eade, Waugh developed a “cruel streak.” His father was bad-tempered, and Waugh hated his older brother—though he said his early years were “happy enough.” When his novel Vile Bodies (1930) established him “as one of the country’s most celebrated young novelists,” his father complained about his son’s “vulgar self-publicising”—even though he ran the press that published it. Eade eschews discussing Waugh’s writings in any depth, preferring to focus on how they relate to the people in his life. The book is brimming with society-page stuff: tales of dalliances and social dinners; quotes commenting on who’s smitten with whom; who is/isn’t a homosexual; etc.—all of which grows tedious eventually. The author admits Waugh was probably something of a snob, but charges of his being a bully may be a stretch.
Eade offers up a softer portrait of Waugh that might help bring him some new readers, which he deserves.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9760-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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