In her long and eventful life, Laura Riding (1901-91) played, according to Baker (Making a Farm, 1981, etc.—not reviewed), the roles of goddess, witch, poet, editor, critic, mistress, collaborator, inspiration, demon, and recluse. Born to a mad mother and a reprobate father on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Riding became a poet and, after a brief stay in Greenwich Village, joined the household of Robert Graves, who became her lover/companion for 14 years. She traveled to Egypt, London (where she attempted suicide), and Mallorca (for a 13-year period covered extensively by Baker)—where she ran a press, published Gertrude Stein, and developed a following of young literati who shared her ideas of communal life. At the start of WW II, Riding and Graves became the guests of Schuylar Jackson, who grew walnut trees in New Hope, Pennsylvania. After Riding reputedly drove Mrs. Jackson insane, she married Schuylar, destroyed her own poetry, invested many years in compiling a dictionary, and, finally, retired for the last 50 years of her life to a tin-roofed hut, without electricity or plumbing, in Wabasso, Florida. In her lifetime, Riding published over a dozen influential collections of poems and collaborated with Graves on an essay in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) that helped initiate the modern age of criticism. She was, Baker says in this first full-length biography, offended by the moral ambiguity of Graves's The White Goddess—which she herself inspired. (Eight page of b&w photographs)
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1364-8
Page Count: 462
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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