A fastidious effort to portray the mighty Kingsley in his full glory.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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