History lite, but an agreeable diversion for undemanding general readers.
A snapshot of Victorian London during a sweltering season rife with scandals and smells.
The “great stink” came from the Thames, into which the city had unwisely been dumping untreated sewage for years. It reached crisis proportions in June 1858, “either the hottest or the second-hottest month on record,” as the temperature peaked at over 100 degrees. The Thames Purification Bill, which laid down broad financial and administrative outlines for cleaning up the river, was one of several controversial acts skillfully maneuvered through a fractious Parliament that summer by Benjamin Disraeli, flagged in the book’s subtitle along with Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin as the putative co-subjects of this rambling narrative by Ashton (Emeritus, English Language and Literature/Univ. Coll. London; Victorian Bloomsbury, 2012, etc.). In fact, the scandal over Dickens’ public separation from his wife and the stir created by the first public reading of Darwin’s ideas on natural selection share space with numerous other topics, including a juicy divorce trial involving his wife’s racy diary; cabinet member Edward Bulwer Lytton’s attempt to dispose of his difficult wife by having her involuntarily confined to an asylum; and a contretemps at the Garrick Club that resulted in the bitter estrangement of Dickens and fellow novelist William Thackeray. Ashton favors a highly episodic approach she calls “microhistory,” which seems to mean rehashing the minute particulars of contemporary periodicals now available digitally; it “can uncover hitherto hidden connections, patterns, and structures,” she asserts, but readers may feel it mostly serves as justification for the author to skip among a plethora of not-particularly-related topics, taking an impressionistic approach to chronology that does not make for clarity. Still, her rather sloppy text is partly redeemed by vivid character sketches and a breezy writing style.
History lite, but an agreeable diversion for undemanding general readers.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-22726-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2017
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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