Among the best Plath psychocritical investigations, by the author of Proust (1990), Brecht (1985), Kafka (1981), Nietzsche (1980), etc. Not a full-bodied life of Plath, Hayman's is a psychological weighing of the nature of the poet's suicide and its prefiguring in her works, deeds, letters, and so on. As ever, Ted Hughes, Plath's husband and now poet laureate of England, has nothing to do with the project; indeed, Hayman takes Hughes and his sister Olwyn to task for vetting earlier biographies by withholding permission to quote Plath unless Hughes or Olwyn had cut the more painful passages. (Hughes also destroyed Plath's last journal, saying he did not want their children to have to face such an upsetting work.) Plath, Hayman shows, sought her disciplinarian father's love; when he died when she was eight, she fell into a symbiotic tie with her mother Aurelia, a martyr to her children's welfare. Aurelia never told Sylvia that clinical depression ran among the women in Otto Plath's side of the family. Sylvia became a poet in part to shine in her mother's eye, grew into an academic workhorse, sold her first stories in her teens, became overloaded and failed her first pill-death effort at 20 (she took too many). That act, though, wrote the end of symbiosis with Aurelia. Sylvia transferred her superego to her psychiatrist; left America and married Hughes, with the commanding Hughes replacing father, mother, and doctor. When Hughes began seeing other women and finally separated to live with Assia Wevill, Sylvia—burdened with two children, drugged, depressed, schizophrenic, gushing razor-edged new poems in the midst of London's worst winter in a century—gassed herself. Four years later, so did Assia, killing her child—by Hughes—as well. Hayman brings new riches to Plath's story, stitching in imagery from the poems while showing that the poems of the last phase have to be read as far more intensely confessional than all that came before. (Eight pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 1-55972-068-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
An intriguing examination of the circumstances surrounding the 1948 murder in Israel of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte. Marton (The Polk Conspiracy, 1990, etc.) interweaves two stories as she traces the paths that led to the killing of Swedish nobleman and diplomat Bernadotte on September 17, 1948. The first story is about Bernadotte himself, who, Marton contends, was a well-meaning amateur in over his head. He had been sent by the UN to end the war that began when Arab armies invaded the newly declared state of Israel. Bernadotte's diplomatic fumbles, such as his proposal to turn Jerusalem over to Jordan, she writes, were misperceived as a mortal threat by Israelis, especially by the militant Stern Gang. The second story is about the Stern Gang, whose members, according to Marton, were driven by an understandable but misguided post-Holocaust paranoia; the resulting kill-or-be-killed attitude blinded them to the ineffectuality of Bernadotte and the UN itself. Marton has done a remarkable job of reconstructing the events leading up to this largely forgotten incident, which seriously threatened Israel's standing among its supporters. If Marton falters slightly, it is in her attempt to draw larger cautionary tales from the assassination. One has to do with the UN's continued inability to end conflicts because it lacks the will to apply meaningful force. The other involves Yitzhak Shamir, the leader of the Stern Gang and eventually Israel's prime minister. Marton contends that the mentality that justified the Stern Gang's terrorism remains a significant factor in Israeli society. She may be right on both counts. But these are highly complex issues, and her generalizations remain superficial in the absence of far more analysis and corroboration. Still, a rare glimpse behind the curtains of a terrorist act, instructive both for the light it sheds on a 46-year-old assassination and for the issues it raises relevant to today.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42083-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
An alternative, conspiratorial retelling of major events of the last 75 years, from the authors of Unholy Trinity (1992). Former Justice Department Nazi-hunter Loftus and Australian journalist Aarons would have us believe that much of recent Western history has had as its common theme ``Get the Jews.'' However, they are far more convincing in arguing that the underlying motivations for most of the evil plots they describe were fanatical anti- communism and/or greed; Jews—mostly pre-1948 Zionists and post- 1948 Israelis—sometimes got in the way. Thus wealthy Americans invested in prewar Nazi Germany because there was money to be made, and Nazis were welcomed to postwar America as fighters against communism; the State Department and American boardrooms were filled with Arabists who had no sympathy for a Jewish state not because it was filled with Jews, but because it was empty of oil. Loftus and Aarons undermine their work by its enormous scope, which makes it virtually impossible to distinguish one chess-gambit conspiracy from another. Also, the sources for their most explosive revelations are ``confidential interviews'' with unnamed veterans of an alphabet soup of espionage agencies: Little hard evidence is presented. Still, like all good conspiracy books, this one offers plausible and intriguing explanations for gray areas of history. These range from how American companies wrested control of Saudi Arabia's oil fields from Great Britain in the 1920s and '30s to the way countries were convinced (blackmailed, say the authors, in a convoluted plot involving Nelson Rockefeller, who was allegedly selling oil to the Nazis all through WW II) to support the creation of Israel in 1948. The book is also enlivened by a rich rogues' gallery, including double (or maybe triple) agents Jack and Kim Philby; and John Foster and Allen Dulles, accused of subverting American foreign policy to their insatiable greed. A conspiracy book offering tasty morsels if one reads with a grain of salt and disregards its sensationalized and misleading title. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-09535-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
