An engaging account of the pain of anonymity in the presence of selfish genius.
A meticulously researched retelling of the tumult of the early 19th century through the most tumultuous family of them all.
Despite the countless chronicles written about the lives and times—and primarily, the scandals—of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley family, Todd (Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation, 2004, etc.) unearths yet another in this story of the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s eldest daughter Fanny, who committed suicide at the age of 22. Born out of wedlock to Wollstonecraft and the American cad Gilbert Imlay, Fanny was just three years old when her beloved mother died giving birth to her half-sister Mary, who would become famous both as the author of Frankenstein and for her elopement with the fatally attractive Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was just 16. Shortly after Wollstonecraft’s early death, her husband, the famed political writer William Godwin, published a biography in which every detail of Wollstonecraft’s sexual indiscretions (including those with him) were laid bare, dooming Fanny to life as a known bastard. But Fanny’s real tragedy, it seemed, was to be the dull one in a family toward whose society everyone in the known world was irresistibly drawn, from Shelley to Lord Byron to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Aaron Burr. In a family of writers, she alone seemed to lack facility with the pen, and, while her half- and step-sisters engaged in scandalous sexual adventures, Fanny was kept duty-bound at home. Because so little is known about the melancholy young woman, Todd is forced to speculate on several key points—for example, what exactly caused her to commit her final act—but she wisely structures the narrative like a mystery, finely drawing out the tension until the end. Fanny remains largely an excuse to tell the story, and the anonymous suicide who was buried in a pauper’s grave remains a cipher.
An engaging account of the pain of anonymity in the presence of selfish genius.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58243-339-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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 2025 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.
