An average biography. Jane Dunn’s Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters (2014) takes a more capacious and satisfying look at the...
A familiar portrait of the prolific British writer.
Fiction writer de Rosnay (A Paris Affair, 2015, etc.) claims that Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca (1938) exerted an indelible influence on her work. When a friend suggested that she write the first French biography of du Maurier, she took on the challenge, deciding to follow in the writer’s footsteps in England and France to discover “the secrets of her life, her inspiration, her work.” De Rosnay offers only brief accounts of her travels, beginning at the Terraces, near Regent Park, where her subject was born; continuing to the village where the teenage Daphne went to boarding school and began an affair with her young headmistress; to the coast of Cornwall, where Daphne walked; to Menabilly, the writer’s beloved home and prototype of Manderley, where de Rosnay’s effort to visit was rebuffed; and to Kilmarth, her last home. All of these sites, though, hardly yielded secrets. Instead, de Rosnay draws largely on du Maurier’s autobiography, letters, and several fine biographies. She adds little to the already available material; this book’s distinction is its presentation in present tense, since de Rosnay aims to describe her subject “as if I were filming her, camera on my shoulder, so that my readers could instantly understand who she was.” This strategy, however, does not convey any more intimacy or revelation than a more conventional authorial voice. Besides chronicling her subject’s successful writing career, de Rosnay reprises her family life, marriage, motherhood, and contradictory sexuality. Homophobic, du Maurier denied that she was a lesbian, but as a child, she invented a male alter ego, Eric Avon, that she felt was her true identity. When she met the virile Tommy Browning, she “shivers” at the “masculine contact” of his kiss. She married him and relegated Eric to a box. He emerged, “sparkling and resplendent,” when she became infatuated with several women.
An average biography. Jane Dunn’s Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters (2014) takes a more capacious and satisfying look at the life.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-09913-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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