A flawed portrait that won’t replace either Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1976) or Katharine M....
An enthusiastic biography of the creator of Oz falls victim to questionable psychologizing and incomplete follow-through.
Lyman Frank Baum (1856–1919) was born near Syracuse, N.Y., in the middle of a diphtheria epidemic. Thus, argues British journalist Loncraine, a preoccupation with death hung over Baum’s childhood, compounded by the casualties of the Civil War. He nevertheless was a lively, entrepreneurial lad who wrote and printed amateur journals on a child’s printing press and later took on printing jobs for local businesses. Loncraine mines Baum’s youth for foreshadowing details—scarecrow nightmares, the yellow-hued Plank Road, a local balloonist’s antics. She also indulges in irresponsible speculation, mentioning that Baum’s father “may have” had the bodies of his four dead children disinterred and reburied. “If so, the process must have disinterred the infants in the family memory as well, and affirmed the ghostly presence of Baum’s shadow siblings.” Baum’s restlessness and enthusiasm took him through several endeavors—in the theater, as a shopkeeper, journalist and traveling salesman—and to the Dakota plains before he hit it big with children’s books after moving to Chicago. The narrative finally comes alive in the chronicle of his career, particularly the Oz books, which made him rich and then sustained him after he bankrupted himself trying to turn his creations into films (the crushing irony is gently noted). Having devoted nearly half of the book to the lead-up to his writing and particularly his purported preoccupation with child mortality, however, there is little payoff in the brief analyses of his prodigious output. Although Loncraine turns a few graceful phrases (“stories were a mixture of pure invention and ideas gathered from the cultural soup that sloshed around the author”), too often she resorts to clunky similes for effect: “He was cracking up, like a muddy hole covered in ice run over and shattered by a wagon wheel.”
A flawed portrait that won’t replace either Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1976) or Katharine M. Rogers’s L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (2002) as authoritative works of Baum scholarship.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-592-40449-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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