A thorough, but familiar, portrait of a tormented artist.
The rise and fall of the Nobel Prize–winning writer.
Dearborn (Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim, 2004, etc.), whose previous biographical subjects include Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, writers noted for their boastful machismo, distills a wealth of material for a richly detailed investigation of another writer intent on proving his vigor and manliness, on the page and off. The author writes that she has “no investment” in promoting the Hemingway legend but rather seeks to examine “what formed this remarkably complex man and brilliant writer” by tracing his career as it unfolded. That aim results in a scrupulous chronology, from which the usual suspects emerge: Hemingway’s wives; famous friends F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound; an ambitious mother, depressed father, and Hemingway’s sons. Even without attempting to burnish the Hemingway legend, Dearborn underscores the charisma of the handsome, athletic man who, critic Edmund Wilson remarked, had an “ominous resemblance to Clark Gable.” Nevertheless, she is clear about his shortcomings, especially his neediness and violent temper. “As long as people around him were worshipful and adoring,” one friend noted, “why then they were great.” If the adoration stopped, they were viciously cut off. This truculence began in childhood and intensified into paranoia as he aged. Also intensifying were Hemingway’s manic episodes, followed by black depressions. Dearborn asserts that this syndrome worsened after a series of traumatic brain injuries and was exacerbated by excessive consumption of alcohol. Not surprisingly, he ended up with liver disease, and although his physicians insisted he give up drinking, he never did. Taking on the question of Hemingway’s sexuality, Dearborn believes that his mother’s practice of styling him and his sister as twins until her son was 6 had lifelong repercussions, including his erotic obsessions with haircuts and color on which Dearborn focuses repeatedly.
A thorough, but familiar, portrait of a tormented artist.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-307-59467-9
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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