As admirers of William Wordsworth’s epochal Lyrical Ballads celebrate that volume’s bicentennial, this conscientious yet surprise-filled life of the poet will deepen their appreciation of his accomplishments. Johnston (English/Indiana Univ.) concentrates on Wordsworth’s (1770—1850) young adulthood, linking the poetry of his “great decade” (1797—1807) to his political and sexual coming-of-age during the Age of Revolution. Such links between Wordsworth and his tumultuous times are not new. But Johnston judiciously presents what was already known (at least to scholars) while uncovering striking new facets of Wordsworth’s life, some heretofore buried in archives, some hidden in plain sight—in the lines of his poetry, for example. Johnston’s opening chapters detail the Wordsworth family’s situation as agents of powerful landed interests and the future poet’s school days amid the natural wonders of England’s Lake District. Orphaned, the teenage Wordsworth became the ward of conservative family elders against whom he rebelled. His studies became increasingly desultory, his extracurricular rambles more adventurous. In 1790, he left Cambridge University to travel in Europe, where he exulted in the climate of revolution. Wordsworth then lived in France for a time, fathering a child out of wedlock. Back in England, he became an intimate of London Radical circles; Johnston suggests that he returned yet again to France amid the Terror to visit his threatened mistress and their child. Johnston’s chapters on Wordsworth’s financial woes and resulting rapprochement with Britain’s conservative ruling elite feature a convincing—although sure to be controversial—argument that Wordsworth served as a British agent in Germany in 1799. Meanwhile, Johnston explores Wordsworth’s relations with his sister, Dorothy, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and with the other companions who supported him as he fashioned himself into the epic poet of the 1805 —Prelude.— Although imposing in its length and occasionally ponderous in its manner, this epic biography is full of romance, rebellion, and intrigue, interleaved with expert glosses on many of history’s most intriguing poems. (photos)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04623-0
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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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