Exhaustive and intimately connected to the English landscape, but lacking the big picture.
English biographer Barker (The Brontës, 1995) sifts tediously and joylessly through the ponderous life of the great nature poet, friend to Coleridge and later laureate of England.
Wordsworth enjoyed a good, long life (1770–1850), and other than youthful forays into revolutionary politics, he led an internally focused one among his Cumberland relatives. Barker chronicles every inch of this studious span—literally, year by year—recording the subtle evolution of a sensitive child, orphaned along with his four siblings and farmed out to Penrith relatives, into a Cambridge scholar, rambler of hill and dale and keen observer of nature, both wild and human. Rejecting a career in the church, Wordsworth decided on literature, though he was hampered by his penury; his father’s estate was mired in a lawsuit that dragged on for decades. A youthful tour abroad resulted in an explosive love affair with Annette Vallon, a French royalist counterrevolutionary with whom Wordsworth conceived a child, although the war between France and England essentially alienated the lovers for good. He shared a delicate sensibility with his younger sister Dorothy, and together they established several households in England’s Lake District, cultivating new friendships with the disciples of philosopher William Godwin and with fellow literary men/republicans Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who would fiercely champion Wordsworth’s genius. With Dorothy accompanying him on his vigorous rambles in search of the picturesque, the poet traversed much of England and the continent on foot, finding his humble subjects in peddlers and wagoners and his style in blank verse. Although Barker acknowledges Dorothy’s valuable selflessness, the biographer takes her to task for her “depth of insecurity and desperate longing for affection,” while the Great Poet himself comes off as a fuddy-duddy. As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted after meeting him, Wordsworth “paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity.”
Exhaustive and intimately connected to the English landscape, but lacking the big picture.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-078731-7
Page Count: 567
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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