A vibrant story of late-blooming love.
A platonic midlife romance strikes creative sparks in this winsome roman á clef.
Fanto, a publisher and artist, knew Richard Ellmann, acclaimed biographer of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, for several years before his death in 1987; the two had collaborated on the creation of a line of arty Wilde-themed playing cards. In Fanto’s fictionalized version of their relationship, they are also soul mates. Nearing 70, Dick Ellmann is a rumpled, warmhearted American scholar, devoted to caring for his invalid wife Mary. Rosita, radiating in all directions from her home in Monte Carlo, is a middle-aged jet-setter who can’t eat dinner in Manhattan without Andy Warhol dropping by her table. But she’s also smart, spontaneous and a devotee of the “l’acte gratuit,” the hidden gesture of uncompensated kindness. (She meets Dick while helping a friend auction off some Joyce letters.) A professional connoisseur of fascinating lives, Dick savors Rosita’s colorful stories of growing up in a wealthy Rumanian family, wartime exile in Brazil, a brother’s assassination and her adventurous encounters with the rich and famous, from Salvador Dali to Orson Welles. In turn, Dick shares his subtle insights into the psyches and geniuses of writers and poets. Their affection grows but is stymied by Dick’s dutifulness toward Mary. It sustains itself on sporadic intercontinental visits, longing letters and hesitant glances full of unspoken desire. A consummation of a kind occurs when Rosita proposes the playing-card project to complement Dick’s soon-to-be-completed Wilde biography, but the aesthetic and intellectual glow of their collaboration darkens as Dick slowly succumbs to Lou Gehrig’s disease. Fanto fills the narrative with risqué witticisms and piquant sketches of the glitterati, but her breezy, stylish prose still conveys the passion and pathos of an attraction that seems all the more intense for being so tightly constrained.
A vibrant story of late-blooming love.Pub Date: April 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4500-6049-3
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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