Literary biographer Hastings (Evelyn Waugh, 1995, etc.) turns to a novelist whose life paralleled the cycles of romantic passion and despair she portrayed in her own books.
The author admits she hedged on the opportunity to write about Rosamond Lehmann, with whom she shared friendship and “hours of gossip” until the latter’s death in 1990, implying that the results of an honest effort (which she has certainly produced) would have been too painful for both. Delving at length into her subject’s family association with the British literati—a grandfather had hobnobbed with Dickens—and early childhood, Hastings finds a girl born to comfort in 1901 but constantly aware that the Upper Class were Different. “Rosie . . . longs for affection,” her father wrote prophetically when she was eight, “and expands under its glow.” An older Rosamond didn’t deny herself when it came to matters of the heart. Trapped in a loveless first marriage, she cheated; her husband knew her lover well, and they became a ménage. When her first novel, Dusty Answer, was published in 1927 to critical acclaim, she began to hear a refrain that would resound for over four decades in response to her novels: “Oh, Miss Lehmann, it’s my story.” Crystallizing female rites of passage in England between the two world wars, her work tapped a seam of empathy far beyond its shores. Her continuing series of serious affairs and flings (one with Ian Fleming) fanned the flames; lesbian readers, for instance, often insisted (wrongly) that she was posing as a heterosexual. Hastings expertly gleans the significant details of emotional attrition along the way and evokes a dark decline. Spurned by longtime lover Cecil Day-Lewis in favor of a younger woman, Rosamond was finally broken by the tragic death of her 24-year-old daughter Sally in 1958.
Sympathetic but true to a life lived for love.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-099-73011-1
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Vintage UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
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The former first lady opens up about her early life, her journey to the White House, and the eight history-making years that followed.
It’s not surprising that Obama grew up a rambunctious kid with a stubborn streak and an “I’ll show you” attitude. After all, it takes a special kind of moxie to survive being the first African-American FLOTUS—and not only survive, but thrive. For eight years, we witnessed the adversity the first family had to face, and now we get to read what it was really like growing up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and ending up at the world’s most famous address. As the author amply shows, her can-do attitude was daunted at times by racism, leaving her wondering if she was good enough. Nevertheless, she persisted, graduating from Chicago’s first magnet high school, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and pursuing careers in law and the nonprofit world. With her characteristic candor and dry wit, she recounts the story of her fateful meeting with her future husband. Once they were officially a couple, her feelings for him turned into a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.” But for someone with a “natural resistance to chaos,” being the wife of an ambitious politician was no small feat, and becoming a mother along the way added another layer of complexity. Throw a presidential campaign into the mix, and even the most assured woman could begin to crack under the pressure. Later, adjusting to life in the White House was a formidable challenge for the self-described “control freak”—not to mention the difficulty of sparing their daughters the ugly side of politics and preserving their privacy as much as possible. Through it all, Obama remained determined to serve with grace and help others through initiatives like the White House garden and her campaign to fight childhood obesity. And even though she deems herself “not a political person,” she shares frank thoughts about the 2016 election.
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6313-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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