Magnificent last volume of Boyd's critical biography of Vladimir Nabokov (Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 1990). What comes through here even more strongly than in volume one is not only a new Nabokov, a masterly teacher-scholar-poet- critic-translator-scientist, but also a human being and novelist not to be confused with his own heroes such as Humbert Humbert or Van Veen any more than Shakespeare should be seen as Lear, Hamlet, or Macbeth. Nabokov, though, is widely seen as a supreme narcissist, even by sympathetic readers—but no longer. Boyd revises everything, all of our misreadings and received ideas, and especially those passed on by Andrew Field's apparently insensitive biographies and commentaries. Everywhere throughout this biography fearful literary folk find themselves in the presence of a self-assured man of simple warmth and friendliness, full of fun and understanding, kindness and courtesy, who appreciates ``the intelligent and observant people who bring me fruit and wine, or come to repair radiators and radios.'' Boyd also takes on the Edmund Wilson/Nabokov feud over Nabokov's 13- year, four-volume work on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin—and Wilson fares badly. As Nabokov rises from destitution to world fame, his each work is taken apart here at great length, much as Nabokov would dissect butterfly genitalia, to get at its aesthetic bliss. A small woman, Vera Nabokov often comes through as seen through Vladimir's eye (he was besotted with his wife to his last breath) as she grapples with the herculean labors of typing up his longhand index cards and keeping up with his colossal business needs in a hydra-growth of languages and countries. After Lolita, contracts flood in and the author finds himself working on five books while composing a sixth in his head. What this biography will do for Nabokov can only be guessed. But for the reader it will awaken a great block of humanity. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-691-06797-X
Page Count: 735
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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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