Sprawling over the boundary between biography and fiction, a tale of the passionate adventures of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson (18411918). There was little in Fanny Stevenson's Indiana farm background that would predict her courageous flight from Victorian convention, unless it was her father's Universalist religion or his determination to teach his daughters to be independent-minded. After following her first husband to the mining districts of Nevada and then to San Francisco, she left him to study painting in France, where she met Robert Louis Stevenson. Ever determined to be in the forefront of artistic trends, Fanny returned to California and settled in Monterey, where Stevenson joined her. She divorced her unfaithful, alcoholic husband in the teeth of opposition from even her most liberal relatives and married Stevenson. They then set out on their well-documented wanderings in the south of France, New York, Hawaii, and the South Seas. Lapierre (daughter of Dominique Lapierre) focuses almost entirely on Fanny and her family, rescuing her from the condescension and even hatred of Robert Louis Stevenson's friends, admirers, and biographers. But is this rightly called a biography? In a preliminary ``warning to the reader,'' Lapierre asserts that the facts conveyed here are strictly true, but concedes that she has often taken the best parts of several letters and reconstructed a better one for her biography. Furthermore, she frequently composes hypothetical conversations in order to make a good story or to illustrate the states of mind of Fanny and those around her. Yet Lapierre reassures the reader, not only with recurrent warnings in the text about gaps in her knowledge, but with intelligent commentary and attention to telling detail. Having energetically retraced Fanny Stevenson's steps, she uses her own knowledge of Nevada, Panama, and Samoa to give the reader a sense of immediacy and place. Published in a smooth and unobtrusive translation from the French, this book is difficult to put down.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0127-7
Page Count: 520
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
