An elegant, well-wrought, and objective biography of a complex but relentlessly unlikable figure. Posterity's picture of Evelyn Waugh has memorialized his frankly piggish demeanor as much as his elegant, barbed prose, and Hastings's sympathetic yet clear-sighted appraisal is likely to leave such impressions intact. Having broken free early from the stifling conventionality of an Edwardian childhood that is deftly sketched by Hastings (Nancy Mitford, 1986), Waugh liberated himself at public school and Oxford into his lifelong traits of snobbery, selfishness, barely veiled misogyny, and reactionism. Waugh's mundane origins notwithstanding, he managed to reinvent himself with spectacular success as spokesman for England's gilded nobility; hence one of the major satisfactions of any life of Waugh is the evocation of a vanished world of privilege. Hastings sets about this task with aplomb, bringing expertly to life personalities from Waugh's expansive acquaintance, famous (including Cyril Connolly and Nancy Mitford) and obscure (such as Alastair Graham, the ``original'' of Brideshead's Sebastian Flyte), in a series of vivid pen-portraits that delineate both their relationship to Waugh and how he represented—or as often misrepresented—them in his own writing. Hastings gives a full and revealing picture of Waugh's midlife conversion to Catholicism and the decisive impact this had on his subsequent self-image and work; her analysis of the sources and merits of Waugh's writing, too, is insightful and judicious. In the end, however, perhaps the strongest impression left by this biography is of a writer who like no other great (or nearly great) artist was possessed of so little basic human sympathy. (63 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-71821-X
Page Count: 724
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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