Readable, if incomplete, account of a national treasure.
A friend and noted scholar of the graciously skilled Southern author fashions a beaming, hefty salute to her long, fruitful life.
Marrs (English/Millsaps Coll.) takes issue with Ann Waldron’s unauthorized biography (Eudora, 1998), which depicted the author as a “charming and successful ugly duckling,” and with Claudia Roth Pierpont’s equally reductive New Yorker portrait of “a perfect lady—a nearly Petrified Woman.” This weightily detailed volume emphasizes Welty’s restless vitality and openness to new experience. The author does not deal in psychoanalytical fine points. In her account, Welty (1909–2001) had a happy childhood in Jackson, Miss., sheltered by adoring parents with whom she would live well into her adult years, but broadened by travel, especially to New York City. Moving from photography, her first love, to fiction, Welty encountered success fairly early and by 1936 saw the publication of her first story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” along with an exhibition of her photographs at a New York gallery. She gradually built up a repertory of exquisitely crafted stories, published as A Curtain of Green in 1941, and garnered a close working relationship with the literary names that would mentor and sponsor her, such as Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, William Maxwell and loyal agent Diarmuid Russell. Welty overcame the crushing disappointment of never marrying her hometown beau, John Robinson, whose inferior literary talent and conflicted sexuality drove him from her by middle age. Gracious to younger talent, she was instrumental in promoting the work of others, such as Reynolds Price. Marrs tenderly asserts that Welty enjoyed an independent life characterized by “the presence of melancholy intertwined with joy.” However, her reluctance to make autobiographical suppositions about her subject’s work leaves this volume faintly dry and ethereal.
Readable, if incomplete, account of a national treasure.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-100914-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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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