An admiring and nuanced book filled with insights into this scholar and man of action in all his complexity.
An unconventional biography of the brilliant economist who shaped British public life in the 20th century.
Historian Davenport-Hines (An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, 2013, etc.) examines the many ways in which John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) left his mark on the age that bears his name. In the 35 years after World War II, Keynes’ economic ideas dominated the policies of Western governments. Yet his celebrated economic theories are little discussed here. Instead, the author traces the many other ways of viewing Keynes’ unusually rich life “as an exemplary figure, as a youthful prodigy, as a powerful government official, as an influential public man, as a private sensualist, as a devotee of the arts and as an international statesman.” A product of Eton and King’s College, Keynes, in his varied undertakings (civil servant, businessman, writer, book collector, and member of the “gifted little clan” called the Bloomsbury Set), “conjoined different networks of expertise, influence and ambitions.” Eschewing chronology, Davenport-Hines focuses on the values and forces that animated Keynes in his engagements with so many spheres of life. With his great curiosity and imagination, Keynes sought always to convince people into “right thinking,” whether in dining clubs and discussion groups or in encounters with leading figures in politics, banking, and the arts. A homely man (with a “queer swollen eel look,” said Virginia Woolf), he was nonetheless highly persuasive, with a beguiling voice that seduced listeners (including many lovers) and a tireless devotion to the belief that only human stupidity and pessimism stood in the way of progress. In all things, he was guided by a concern for how people could lead virtuous and productive lives. The author offers vivid glimpses of Keynes’ interactions with such contemporaries as Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Vanessa Bell.
An admiring and nuanced book filled with insights into this scholar and man of action in all his complexity.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-06067-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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