The Russian Nobel laureate speaks his mind on poetry, other poets, and his life in conversations with another intellectual Russian ÇmigrÇ. In his preface, Volkov (St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, 1995, etc.) suggests that his reader regard these conversations with Brodsky ``as a guide, a kind of Baedeker, to the breathtaking, often beautiful, and at times forbidding territory of Brodsky's life and art.'' It is a bad start. This kind of blurb-speak immediately sets the teeth on edge, and the pages that follow do not bear out Volkov's exaggerated claim. Little bears directly on Brodsky's art. But we do hear Brodsky talking about his life (arrest, trial) under the Soviet regime and then his life in exile in the US. And he talks a good deal about the art of other writers, in particular Marina Tsvetaeva (his favorite candidate for great poet of the century), Anna Akhmatova (``she set our souls in motion''), W.H. Auden (an aphoristic thinker), and Robert Frost (the great poet of horror). As we might expect, Brodsky has various interesting things to say about poets and poetry. Unfortunately, Volkov's freewheeling conversations do not probe deeply. Volkov, as rough-and-ready a talker as the great poet, encourages him to roam extravagantly in his literary chitchat, which means that he fails in his task as an interviewer. He doesn't always press the poet into greater precision and fuller depth. Still, you cannot go terribly wrong with Brodsky as your partner in conversation. There is much of interest here. Though this is not so lean and pithy as the general reader may wish, students of poetry will find Volkov's book suggestive. And as for the autobiographical material it makes available, Brodsky offers a caveat: ``There is nothing duller than to look at an artist's work as the result of his life.'' (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83572-X
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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