Not much here that hasn’t been exhaustively discussed in Norman Sherry’s three-volume The Life of Graham Greene (1989, 1995,...
Misty remembrances by Greene’s late-life French mistress reveal intimate moments but few state secrets.
Cloetta was interviewed shortly before her death in 2001 by French journalist Allain, whose parents were friends of Greene’s. (The mysterious 1960 assassination in Morocco of the interviewer’s father, Resistance hero Yves Allain, provides a shadowy subtext here.) Cloetta recalls first meeting the famous English author in 1959, when she was living in Douala, Cameroon, with her importer husband and two teenaged daughters. Diminutive, boyish and intelligent, 36-year-old Cloetta was apparently in the process of separation (though she never actually divorced), while Greene, at 55, had not quite extricated himself from his relationship with Catherine Walston. Nonetheless, after he moved permanently to Antibes in the mid-1960s the lovers allowed themselves to be “carried away by passion,” as Cloetta describes it to Allain. The interviewer asks some barbed questions: Did the reluctant Cloetta ever wonder, after being lured by Greene to a Paris brothel for an evening of fun, what kind of “very strange character” she was getting involved with? “My whole life has been a secret,” Cloetta provocatively asserts; appropriately, her answers are elusive. Allain can’t even get Cloetta to admit that Greene was playing a double game with his good friend, English spy turned Soviet defector Kim Philby. She acknowledges only that “to the very end, he worked with the British Services.” Cloetta’s portrait of her lover is touching and convincing. It also confirms his “passion for secrecy”: the doubts, suspicions and aspersions cast since Greene’s death in 1991 won’t likely ever be cleared.
Not much here that hasn’t been exhaustively discussed in Norman Sherry’s three-volume The Life of Graham Greene (1989, 1995, 2004)—or, for that matter, in Allain’s own The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (1983).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7475-7108-2
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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