Though readers may not understand L'Engle the human being any better than they did before, they will certainly come away...
A multifaceted portrait of the complicated writer who won the 1963 Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time.
Timed as part of the publisher's 50th-anniversary celebration of the beloved classic (an observance that also includes a graphic-novel treatment by Hope Larson and the inevitable commemorative reissue), this collection brings more than 50 voices to bear on the life and career of Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007). Children's-literature scholar Marcus (Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter: Conversations with 21 of the World's Most Celebrated Illustrators, 2012, etc.) approached the project with a curator's eye, seeking out interview subjects who knew L'Engle in an impressive range of roles. He has arranged their remarks thoughtfully, in sections that cover L'Engle as a child and youth, writer, matriarch, mentor, friend and icon. Readers most familiar with her work for children will discover L'Engle the Anglican mystic, and vice versa. Marcus is an unobtrusive interrogator; in many cases, he elides his questions altogether, allowing his interlocutors to speak fluidly and directly. Though their relationships with L'Engle were varied, common threads emerge. An actor by training, L'Engle consciously constructed her own public persona, transforming her biography and history into "mythic material," as with the ever-expanding number of rejections she received for A Wrinkle in Time. Generous with the public ("Fame fit her like a glove," remarks Stephen Roxburgh, one of her editors), her personal life was not so easy—only one of her two surviving children chose to participate. Many of the interviewees directly respond to Cynthia Zarin’s controversial 2004 profile in the New Yorker (including Zarin), though few try to refute it. Other contributors include Judy Blume, Jane Yolen, T.A. Barron, Thomas Cahill and Wendy Lamb.
Though readers may not understand L'Engle the human being any better than they did before, they will certainly come away with a greater appreciation for the way she grappled with her life and wrestled it into narrative.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-29897-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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