Latest of several biographies of the British comic novelist, written by the editor of his letters and sanctioned by his son, the novelist Martin Amis.
This capacious, cluttered life of big-living Kingsley Amis (1922–95) emphasizes the craftsmanship of his fiction and the importance of his frequently overlooked poetry. Leader (English Literature/Roehampton Univ., London) aims to show “what it was like to meet Amis and to be him.” The facts don’t differ from those documented by Eric Jacobs in Kingsley Amis (1995) and Richard Bradford in Lucky Him (2001). Amis’s father was an office worker; the family lived in a drab London suburb. Kingsley attended City of London School and in 1940 went up to Oxford, where he formed seminal friendships with Philip Larkin and “The Seven,” who all loved jazz and wrote poetry influenced by Auden. He served in the Royal Signals Corps, then returned to Oxford and took up with art student Hilary Bardwell. Hilly got pregnant, and they got married in 1948, shortly after Amis’s first book of poetry, Bright November, appeared. A legacy from Hilly’s mother allowed the growing family to live comfortably while Kingsley lectured in English at University College of Swansea. Aided by Larkin’s critical suggestions, Lucky Jim emerged in 1954 and made Amis’s reputation. That Uncertain Feeling, I Like It Here, Take a Girl Like You and other succeeding novels increased his fame and added him to the ranks of the Angry Young Men, a label he repudiated. He’d always been an inveterate drinker and philanderer, but his more serious affair with Jane Howard prompted Hilly to break up the marriage in 1963. (Leader takes care to show Amis’s tenderness toward his children.) Moving from documentary realism into such genre efforts as Colonel Sun and The Green Man, the increasingly dissolute and aggressively self-interested author never lost his literary powers; The Old Devils won the Booker in 1986.
A fastidious effort to portray the mighty Kingsley in his full glory.Pub Date: April 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-42498-9
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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