Lawson ably encompasses the life of this mysterious, many-sided author, from nymph to mother to crone.
Lawson (The Allens Affair, not reviewed) offers an intriguing, surprisingly rich literary life of the fairly obscure Australian author best known for her cheery children's series featuring nanny Mary Poppins.
The Disney film based on Travers’s well-loved flying English nanny was not made until 1963, 30 years after Mary Poppins was originally published. Here, Lawson uncovers Travers’s various disguises. Born in Maryborough (Queensland) in 1899, Helen Lyndon Goff absorbed fanciful stories and poetry told by her English-Irish father, a banker who drank heavily and was eventually demoted from bank manager to clerk. With his death, Travers fell under the supervision of her stalwart spinster aunt, Ellie, in Bowral (New South Wales), and our smart young heroine, known then as Pamela, eventually set out for Sydney with the short-lived plan of making her name as an actress. Travels to England and Ireland whetted her appetite for becoming a writer, and correspondence with George William Russell, “AE,” the older married editor of the Irish Statesman, had both romantic and literary implications. AE introduced her to Yeats and encouraged her to publish; her first stories about the Banks children and their dictatorial, magical nanny Mary Poppins first appeared in 1926. Travers traveled extensively as a journalist and seems to have latched onto older, powerful male figures all her life: Besides AE, there was Alfred Richard Orage, Armenian guru G.I. Gurdjieff and Irish critic Francis Macnamara. Travers wrote her many Mary Poppins adventures over the course of 54 years, with delicate drawings by Mary Shepard; with Disney's film adaptation, Travers became a rich woman, though not a famous one. Her adoption of a Dublin twin, Camillus, allowed her finally someone to “love and control,” and she settled comfortably into the role of New Age disciple. She died in 1996.
Lawson ably encompasses the life of this mysterious, many-sided author, from nymph to mother to crone.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-9816-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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