A fresh and fair assessment of Hemingway’s life and work that refreshingly avoids slipping into hagiography.
With the opening of Cuba’s Hemingway archives in Havana, a Hemingway scholar plunged into two years of research. The result is this original portrait of the author’s life and work.
Going to the “source” after “54 years of Cold War blockade,” New Orleans–based academic Feldman adds extensively to the already massive Hemingway archival material. Cuba—and, in particular, the Finca Vigía that he bought with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, in 1939—became the center of many things: his writing solace and success; his alternating marital bliss and torment (after Gellhorn, he brought Mary Welsh there, where they lived off and on until his suicide in Idaho in 1961); his heartfelt attachment to the locals and their families; his watering hole and source of fishing adventures; and the ultimate degradation in his health, mostly from drinking. Feldman engagingly traces Hemingway’s remarkable journey as an American writer and mythmaker on many levels. At the same time, he delineates the history of modern Cuba, especially the creation of Havana as a glamorous magnet for rich Americans while it festered in political turbulence, culminating in Fidel Castro’s consolidation of power in 1959. While the sordid details of Hemingway’s affairs, excessive drinking, and brutal treatment of family and friends are familiarly difficult to read, what remains in Feldman’s eloquent, evenhanded biography is a palpable sense of the author’s fierce allegiance to his work, which crushed everything that came in the way, including wives and devoted friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Papa’s demons, in the end, caught up with him, leaving many books (Islands in the Stream, A Moveable Feast, True at First Light) unfinished. Feldman concludes with a touching chronicle of how Castro revered the author ("All the work of Hemingway is a defense of human rights") and how the Cubans remember El Americano warmly to this day.
A fresh and fair assessment of Hemingway’s life and work that refreshingly avoids slipping into hagiography.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61219-638-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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