by Roy Morris Jr. ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 2013
A fondly erudite look at a young, likable celebrity in the making.
A spirited account of the young Wilde’s inspiring 11-month tour of America.
Morris (Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, 2010, etc.) chronicles a year in the life of Irish dandy and belletrist Wilde, who, at age 27, was bent on invading America the way Dickens had a generation before. An Oxford graduate, poet, student of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and enthusiastic and visible proponent of the aesthetic movement in England, Wilde was, by January 1882, when he arrived in New York, already famous, though few could say why. Wilde was a self-promoting genius, Morris writes, “created, cultivated and commodified,” like celebrities today. He hadn’t yet written his famous works or openly embraced gayness, but in his elaborate, precious outfits, sporting sunflowers and lilies, dropping affected bons mots for journalists to scoop up as he instructed American audiences with authority on “The Beautiful” and “The Artistic Character of the English Renaissance,” Wilde was challenging traditional notions of masculinity and also creating his celebrity. Morris goes step by step in this, drawing on Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst’s book of newspaper interviews Oscar Wilde in America (2010) for a record of his decidedly uneven reception, from rapturous audiences in New York, where Napoleon Sarony took his famous photographs of Wilde in various guises; to Chicago, where he insulted his Midwestern audience for their ugly waterworks; to Denver, San Francisco, the South and Canada. He met Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Jefferson Davis and Ulysses S. Grant and generated “verbal donnybrooks” all along the way. In the end, Wilde and America shared a mutual affection.
A fondly erudite look at a young, likable celebrity in the making.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-674-06696-0
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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