An enjoyable extended footnote to the lives of the better known.
An engaging account of an author and his editor wife who may be obscure even to critics of modernist literature.
Here is a biography in which the supporting cast generates most of the interest. Klaidman (Coronary: A True Story of Medicine Gone Awry, 2007, etc.) recognizes that it was a challenge proposing such a book when “only a small number of scholars and aficionados of the modern period had ever heard of the Schiffs.” Yet Sydney and Violet Schiff were well-known to the likes of Proust, Eliot, Joyce and Picasso, with whom they socialized and corresponded. They hosted a literary salon, and they served as patrons of the arts. They were also literary figures themselves, he the author and she his editor of A True Story, a Proustian series of autobiographical novels that were praised at the time by their famous friends but have since succumbed to obscurity. It isn’t necessarily Klaidman’s intent to generate interest in work he believes has been unjustly neglected, but to explore the literary London of a century ago—when it was “the undisputed capital of the literary world…the baptismal font of modernism”—through the experiences and particularly the letters of a couple in the midst of its social swirl. Some dismissed them as “rich poseurs” and “fawning acolytes” (particularly toward Proust), while Eliot once wrote after a visit that they were “very nice Jews.” The book builds toward the savage skewering of the Schiffs by Wyndham Lewis, a painter who had accepted both their friendship and their money, in his novel The Apes of the Gods, “published in 1930 and…almost immediately forgotten because most of it is hopelessly obscure unless you are intimately familiar with the lives of the real people who were its hapless targets.” Few readers will be, though they’ll know more about the Schiffs after finishing this book than almost anyone knew before.
An enjoyable extended footnote to the lives of the better known.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53409-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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