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Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail.

After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago's notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros.

Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow―but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1993, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.
Secret Historian is a 2010 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

• Sales Rank: #418023 in Books
• Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Published on: 2010-08-17
• Released on: 2010-08-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.14" h x 1.49" w x 6.38" l, 1.71 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

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• Great product!

From Publishers Weekly
Life in the closet proves boisterous indeed in this biography of an iconic figure of the pre-Stonewall gay demimonde. Steward (1909–1993) was an English professor, a novelist who wrote both well-received literary fiction and gay porn, a confidant of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, a furtive but exuberant erotic adventurer whose taste for sailors, rough trade, and violent sadomasochism endeared him to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey; later in life, he became Phil Sparrow, official tattoo artist of the Oakland, Calif., Hell's Angels. Spring (Paul Cadmus) fleshes out this colorful story by quoting copiously from his subject's highly literate journals and sex diaries—his Stud File contained entries on trysts with everyone from Rudolph Valentino to Rock Hudson—which afford an unabashed account of Steward's erotic picaresque and the yearnings that drove it. (His swerve from academia into tattooing, with its mix of physical pain and proximity to nubile male flesh, was essentially a fetish turned into a business.) Spring's sympathetic and entertaining story of a life registers the limitations imposed on homosexuals by a repressive society, but also celebrates the creativity and daring with which Steward tested them. Photos. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Somewhere in the United States, there may be an attic containing the written remnants of a previously unchronicled 20th-century life that was even more astonishing than the one the writer Justin Spring discovered in San Francisco a few years ago. But even the most skeptical reader of his new book, Secret Historian, will have to admit that the bar is now set high. Samuel Steward, the subject of this absorbing act of biographical excavation, had many identities, including several that the subtitle of the book omits . . . Be assured that it's all for real, and that Spring, even when neck-deep in sensational material, is not a sensationalist. As a biographer, he's humble but firm--he lets Steward's vivid, energetic prose do much of the talking but keeps his own hand on the tiller and never gets giddy, even when Steward seems to be carousing his way through the entire Modern Library . . . The probity and expansive vision of Spring's work is a reminder that a great, outspread terrain of gay history remains to be mapped . . . One suspects there are many more stories of that time worth telling, and too few treasure-packed attics.” ―Mark Harris, The New York Times Book Review

“Can a secret sex diary furnish an artistic legacy as meaningful as Emily Dickinson's sewn-up bundles of poems, or the piles of paintings Theo van Gogh inherited after his brother's premature demise? Samuel Steward may never have imagined it, but his erotic history raises the question. A talented writer who early attracted the attention of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, he found his career blocked by a determination (so different from hers and his) to write candidly about his homosexuality . . . Steward was an obsessive record keeper, and his journals and his ‘Stud File' of thousands of encounters allow [Justin Spring] to create a remarkably full portrait of a man whose life was what Edmund White's might have been had White been born three decades earlier . . . [This] extensive documentation--and the miraculous rescue of that documentation, recounted in the book's preface--left his biographer material to reconstruct an emblematic homosexual life.” ―Benjamin Moser, Harper's

“Justin Spring's jaw-dropping Secret Historian reads like a novel probing a lifelong rebel's courage, creativity and ultimate sadness . . . Spring has reconstituted Steward, as Phil Andros might say, in flesh and blood and all sorts of bodily fluids.” ―David D'Arcy, San Francisco Chronicle

“This is a rich and exuberant biography of a man who deserves to be better known” ―The Economist

“A fascinating biography . . . [Steward] tackled life with awe-inspiring abandon” ―Details

“Life in the closet proves boisterous indeed in this biography of an iconic figure of the pre-Stonewall gay demimonde . . . Spring's sympathetic and entertaining story of a life registers the limitations imposed on homosexuals by a repressive society, but also celebrates the creativity and daring with which Steward tested them.” ―Publishers Weekly

“[A] provocative biography . . . Generous excerpts from Steward's journals and unpublished memoirs fortify an already comprehensive examination of a life lived with unabashed independence and homoerotic expression during the sexual rebellion of the pre-Stonewall era . . . A vivid, candid portrait.” ―Kirkus Reviews

“Justin Spring documents the extraordinary life of one of Kinsey's crucial gay witnesses, and reading Secret Historian is like reading Kinsey dramatized. A cultivated, rather shy professor of English literature, Sam Steward dropped out in midlife to become an eminent tattooist and writer of S&M porn. As the story of a sex-obsessed recovering alcoholic later addicted to barbiturates and to masochistic thrills, this could easily have become a portrait of a failure. Instead, through Steward's copious records, we have a brave, fly-on-the-wall account of American homosexual subculture and persecution.” ―Martin Stannard, author of Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark: The Biography

“A true page-turner--and a memorable act of historical reclamation. Sammy Steward is all but unknown except by a handful of historians, but Justin Spring's lively biography--which is full of important new information about pre-Stonewall gay life--should put Sammy on the map, which is where he decidedly belongs.” ―Martin Duberman, author of Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey

“Secret Historian is a startlingly, unforgettably vivid glimpse into a life--and a world--that few of us can imagine.” ―Terry Teachout, author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

“Samuel Steward, secret sexual historian, is a secret no longer. From an evangelical Ohio boardinghouse to the gardens of the Villa Borghese, from the lobby of the City Opera to the South Side YMCA, Steward led--and recorded--an improbably revealing, representative life. Bedding Oscar Wilde's Bosie, taking tea with Stein and Toklas, and confessing to (and performing for!) Dr. Kinsey, he seemed determined to leave no corner of twentieth-century American queer culture unexplored and undocumented. Justin Spring has rescued his story from a San Francisco attic and set it before twenty-first-century readers with unflagging patience, authority, and humanity--Secret Historian is a major achievement.” ―Langdon Hammer, author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate

“Justin Spring has painstakingly and compassionately unearthed the labyrinthine world of a brilliant, multifaceted, and troubled creator. A classically educated and highly talented renegade intellectual, Steward's trajectory was impacted at every turn by his sexual compulsions. This bittersweet story, with its hair-raising and obsessively recorded details, is astonishing. Steward's humor, empathy, and refusal to bow to the repressive status quo are a moving testimonial to honesty, courage, and integrity. His story should resonate with anyone engaged in the ongoing struggle for personal freedom of identity.” ―Ed Hardy

“This is a rare and important book. Secret Historian is a genuinely captivating combination of clear writing, a clean conscience, and more dirty stories than I ever imagined one life could hold.” ―Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

About the Author

Justin Spring is a writer specializing in twentieth-century American art and culture, and the author of many monographs, catalogs, museum publications, and books, including Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art and Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude.

Most helpful customer reviews

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful.
What Secret Historan means to me
By David
Truth is indeed stranger (and a helluva lot more fun) than fiction! Had the life of this incredible man not been so thoroughly researched (a decade in the making) by the author, Justin Spring, and so meticulously documented by the subject himself, one would scarcely believe such a life could have existed.

Secret Historian, The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, intrigued and touched me on so many levels. Firstly, it's a real page-turner. I didn't want to put it down, as I could hardly wait to find out what Sam was going to get himself into next. And trust me, Sam never let me down!

Secondly, as a devotee of gay history, not since Donald Vining's detailed diary has a gay man's day to day life been documented in such vivid detail. Through Sam Steward's scandalous Stud File, his letters, his journal and other writings, Justin Spring's fascinating book shatters the myth that the pre-Stonewall gay life was all gloom and sexless doom.

This is not to say that Sam, being an isolator who eschewed emotional attachments with other men (and who battled alcohol and drug addictions), didn't have his share of loneliness and depression, especially in his later years when he felt he was no longer sexually viable. Indeed, with the iconoclastic life he designed for himself, a later life of addiction, isolation and sadness seemed inevitable. Fortunately, Sam's delightful sense of humor, very much in evidence in this book, sustained him through most of his darkest hours.

And therein lies the primary reason this book moved me so much. Except for Sam's fascination with S/M sex, I found such a great number of parallels between his life and my own, his thought processes and life choices, that the final chapters in this book served as a wake-up call; a realization that unless I made some serious lifestyle and career changes, that my own golden years would likely be filled with solitude and detachment as Sam's had.

My only regret is that, after being introduced to Sam Steward in this moving and entertaining biography, I was never able to meet the man in person. But thanks to the author's obvious affection for his subject, I feel as though I have.

I've never written a book review in my 50 years, And it's not often that a book can not only hold one's interest through two readings, but also serve as a catalyst to change one's life. But Secret Historian has done just that.

And Dear Justin Spring: I had to make sure that you knew.

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Rescued from oblivion
By Jim Coughenour
I knew I was going to enjoy this biography from its first page. Spring writes, "I first came across Steward's name in the gay pulp fiction archive and database at the John Hay Special Collections Library at Brown University..." The gay pulp fiction archive?! Immediately readers know they're in for a ride.

Samuel Steward (aka Donald Bishop, Thomas Cave, John McAndrews, Phil Sparrow, Ward Stames, Phil Andros) was a poet, novelist, Catholic English professor, tattoo artist, gay pornographer, friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice Tolkas, and a key contributor to Alfred Kinsey's sex research. Justin Spring has rescued this astonishing character from oblivion, giving him the break he never got in what Steward described as "my happily wasted life."

This biography is definitely not for the gentle reader. Steward's prodigious sexual escapades from the 30s through the 80s made my few remaining hairs stand on end. Sailors, thugs, underage hustlers, Rudolph Valentino, Thorton Wilder, students, policemen, ex-cons, priests and one Hells Angel, scripted orgies, brutal S/M sessions: all were documented in his meticulous "Stud File." Almost despite himself, quiet little Steward was a defiant, transgressive artist to his core, surviving repression, literary rejection, AIDS, alcoholism and depression with a staggering sense of aplomb. One favorite example (that will only mean something to gay readers of a certain age): in his late 50s, Steward's favorite paid partner was "one very talented and extraordinarily good-looking hustler who later took the porn name of Johnny Hardin... Between late 1966 and 1970 Steward had sex with him 155 times." Now there is a fun fact to know and tell.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Three Stars
By Amazon Customer
Well written but I would have enjoyed reading Mr Steward's diaries more.

See all 89 customer reviews...

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Not since Donna Tartt's The Secret History has a novel this intoxicating captured the headiness and dark temptations of university life.

The old Etruscan city of Grifonia swarms with year-abroad students―thousands of them from all over. Ostensibly, they've come to study. But really they are here to reinvent themselves, to shuck their identities and buck constraints far from the watchful eyes of parents and others who know them too well. There's a reason Henry James's young ladies went to Europe with chaperones. Today's young ladies don't.
In Abroad, the bestselling novelist Katie Crouch―whose Girls in Trucks brilliantly portrayed the cruelties of postcollege New York life on a Southern girl trying to make her way―tears a story from international headlines and transforms it into a page-turning parable of modern girlhood, full of longing and reckless behavior. As the heroine (and the reader) of Abroad will soon discover, Grifonia is a city filled with dangerous secrets of many kinds: ancient, eternal, infernal.
"Prepare to have your heart broken while laughing out loud at this breathtaking, scathingly sardonic novel," wrote People magazine's reviewer about Crouch's Men and Dogs. "From her opening line. . . Crouch grabs you and never lets go." In Abroad, Crouch's mesmerizing talents are again on full display.

• Sales Rank: #1103246 in Books
• Published on: 2014-06-17
• Released on: 2014-06-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.24" h x 1.04" w x 6.12" l, 1.10 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Booklist
Crouch (Men and Dogs, 2010) draws inspiration from recent headlines and ancient Italian history alike in this based-on-fact tale of an innocent on foreign ground. The lucky recipient of a study-abroad scholarship, Tabitha—Taz for short—leaves her native Ireland for Grifonia, Italy, where she and hundreds of other college students are thrown together without supervision and nothing to do but study and explore. Against her expectations, Taz finds herself running with a glamorous crowd. Crouch lets us know from the novel’s first lines that things are not what they seem, and as the plot unspools, the reader learns, through flashbacks to the lives of women of the past, just how deeply the secrets of Grifonia are buried. Crouch steadily strengthens an ominous undercurrent sweeping toward Taz, whose fragile, eager personality Crouch conveys with mastery along with Taz’s equally unique and compelling friends and lovers. The novel’s voice is absolute, its appeal irresistible, and the ending is simultaneously poignant and horrific. Abroad will not disappoint any reader, especially those interested in Europe’s rich history and ambience. --Amber Peckham

Review

“Crouch ventures daringly into dark new terrain… with a psychological grab-your-throat thriller. Crouch gives indelible voice to the murder victim… [and] the novel… holds you in its ever-tightening grip, with a heady mix of history, burning secrets and exquisite language.” ―San Francisco Chronicle

“Abroad is gorgeously written, with a steady drumbeat of dread infusing every page... It is astonishingly self-assured and perfectly paced without ever taking on a whiff of tabloid sensationalism. Author Katie Crouch captures the intoxicating--and sometimes dangerous--freedom of being a young student with seemingly limitless choices.” ―BookPage

“A psychological thriller that'll make you shiver on a warm summer's night.” ―Chicago Tribune Printers Row

“A beautiful commentary on the ephemeral nature of life and love.” ―Charleston Magazine

“Provocative, empathetic.” ―New Republic

“Crouch conveys [her characters] with mastery…. The novel's voice is absolute, its appeal irresistible, and the ending is simultaneously poignant and horrific. Abroad will not disappoint any reader.” ―Booklist

“Crouch skillfully explores how the influence of peer pressure and the desire to be accepted impacts insecure young women…. The author presents a riveting look into the social dynamics of young women freed from the social dictates of their childhood homes.” ―Library Journal

“Katie Crouch's beautiful and haunting novel is so much more than a fictionalized account of a true crime in an Italian college town. It's a guided tour of the winding and sometimes twisted avenues that lead strangers to a place of friendship, love, treachery, and sacrifice. I loved this book.” ―Ann Leary, author of The Good House

“Abroad is a riveting page-turner populated by vain, destructive, and yet altogether intriguing characters. A tribute to the complexities of youth, a vivid picture of both ancient and modern Italy, and most of all, a complex psychological thriller, Abroad will incite debate, admiration, and awe.” ―Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers

“Katie Crouch has the artist's gaze that lets her look at a moment as contemporary as a tabloid headline and see the eternal verities within it. Abroad combines her winsomely modern ear with an eye for the perils and ecstasies that have defined young-womanhood across centuries.” ―Jonathan Dee, author of The Privileges

“Katie Crouch's Abroad is as seductive as a chilled Campari on a sunny Italian afternoon. Crouch excels at describing the complex geography of female friendship. Her tale of an innocent abroad mixes murder, lust, and Etruscan mythology into a heady cocktail.” ―Tatjana Soli, New York Times bestselling author of The Lotus Eaters

“From the first page of this cunningly suspenseful, brilliantly imagined novel, you know where you're headed--but then again, you don't. With uncanny psychological precision and a dark, dead-on wit, Katie Crouch explores how the casual follies of youth all too quickly turn tragic. That she does so by blending ancient history with a true-crime story whose twists and turns still claim international headlines makes it all the more powerful. Prepare to be entertained, terrified, and haunted.” ―Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of Three Junes

“A classic character study, a strong plot, and taut pacing make this novel a good read. The codas that sit between chapters and hold all that history, true and imagined; the elegant prose; and a deeply human sensibility are what elevate it to an incredible read.” ―Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas and The Virgin of Flames

“Katie Crouch's Abroad had me miss an appointment, hide in the bathroom to escape guests and read a few more pages, and finally surrender by getting into bed to feverishly drink this addictive book in one long gulp. Abroad sneakily lures you in with its five alluring women in search of enlightenment--or at least friendship--in a foreign land, and then startles you with its complexity. Crouch is a master writer who captures a provocative news story and then wrestles it, through mythology and history, to stare at death and what lies beyond it.” ―Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation

“From her opening line . . . Crouch grabs you and never lets go.” ―Meredith Maran, People on Men and Dogs

About the Author

Katie Crouch is the New York Times bestselling author of Girls in Trucks, among other novels. She contributes to The Guardian, McSweeney's, Tin House, Slate, the Rumpus, and Salon. A MacDowell fellow, Crouch teaches at San Francisco State University and lives in Bolinas, California.

Most helpful customer reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
"Later you can hear your life again. Word for word, unbiased."
By Amelia Gremelspacher
Taz was an Irish girl now talking to us after her death in Italy where she has gone to study. This voice is distinctive in its joined use of participant and observer. Taz casts her gaze across the young women who journey to Italy to engage in different lives and watches the ways that women may go astray. Included in her story are the short vignettes of young girls preyed upon across the centuries who died and added their blood to the soil of the small town where Taz was studying. The author is able to capture the longing for a bigger life, for a life of allure, that haunts a young girl unformed in her views of herself. She is unobtrusive in her blending of hindsight into Taz's daily thoughts. The reader shares Taz's knowledge of her imminent death, but is does not know the murderer or the circumstances. This makes each perilous decision the more weighty in the mind.

Taz is a beguiling girl. Even after death, she is unsure of her power over those around her. She is sharply aware of the divide between herself and the friends she makes, and only sporadically does she realize her own beauty and charisma. The book successfully makes her a distinctive soul while keeping her an "everywoman". The setting comes strikingly clear in its discordant modern and ancient divisions. The question of Taz's location in the afterlife seductively twines with the mysteries of the Etruscan civilization that vanished without a literature in the same hills. Their ghosts hover silently in the pages of this novel. While this book enacts a famous recent murder in Italy, its allure far surpasses the echo. This is a wonderful story of the short life of a young woman too close to peril as she struggles for a new horizon.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Non-innocents Abroad
By William Merrill
American author Katie Crouch's novel called Abroad chronicles the descent of a young British woman into a decadent and dangerous lifestyle while participating in an exclusive foreign-student college program in a small Italian city. She falls in with "the wrong crowd," a trio of high-living classmates, and her fate is essentially sealed in that moment. While the story has a gripping and irresistible forward momentum, I found the characters' behavior consistently annoying throughout the book. This gets into the classic debate about whether a novelist has still written a good story if the characters are all unsympathetic or even repulsive to the reader. Certainly that is possible, except in this case I had another problem with Abroad, that the plot kind of stagnated for me -- too much meaningless partying and "living it up," to the point of repetitiveness. Only a couple of scenes stood out, when the four "friends" manage to intrude on an exclusive "secret society" party they were not invited to, as well as their "weekend at the castello." The former passage was vaguely reminiscent of a pivotal scene from the film Eyes Wide Shut. Not enough of that kind of stuff, though, plus I thought the ending was too unoriginal.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
better for older teens and college students
By Queenie333
It could have stood alone without the connection to a very sad true story, wish the author hadn't tied them together. But since she did, it gave an interesting alternate theory and created a deeper background than the press ever presented. Much sympathy to all involved. If you followed the case you will enjoy it. There were many aspects of the plot that took too long to tie together and seemed random. More truthful representation of the reality of young students abroad. Writing was clean and pace kept ticking along enough that I didn't give up at some of the cheesier spots.

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1907 Edwardian Dublin, a city of whispers and rumors. At the Abbey Theatre W. B. Yeats is working with the talented John Synge, his resident playwright. It is here that Synge, the author of The Playboy of the Western World and The Tinker’s Wedding, will meet an actress still in her teens named Molly Allgood. Rebellious, irreverent, beautiful, flirtatious, Molly is a girl of the inner-city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America. Witty and watchful, she has dozens of admirers, but it is the damaged older playwright who is her secret passion despite the barriers of age, class, education, and religion.

Synge is a troubled, reticent genius, the son of a once prosperous landowning family, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions. Yet his life is hampered by conventions and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives. Scarred by a childhood of immense loneliness and severity, he has long been ill, but he loves to walk the wild places of Ireland. The affair, sternly opposed by friends and family, is turbulent, sometimes cruel, and often tender.

1950s postwar London, an old woman walks across the city in the wake of a hurricane. As she wanders past bomb sites and through the forlorn beauty of wrecked terraces and wintry parks, her mind drifts in and out of the present as she remembers her life’s great love, her once dazzling career, and her travels in America. Vivid and beautifully written, Molly’s swirling, fractured narrative moves from Dublin to London via New York with luminous language and raw feeling. Ghost Light is a story of great sadness and joy—a tour de force from the widely acclaimed and bestselling author of Star of the Sea.

• Sales Rank: #1524761 in Books
• Published on: 2011-02-01
• Released on: 2011-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.49" h x .95" w x 5.73" l, .82 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
O'Connor (Redemption Falls) presents a turbulent love story loosely based on the relationship between Irish playwright John Synge and actress Molly Allgood. The story opens in post-WWII London, where Molly is a spinster with a fondness for drink, but through a series of reminiscences the reader learns that, in her youth, she was a promising actress out of the poorer quarters of Dublin. Working in a theater group that included her more talented older sister and W.B. Yeats, Molly soon develops an attraction to the significantly older playwright Synge. She is pugnacious and ambitious, he circumspect and introverted, but the two secretly fall in with one another, and over the course of years they struggle with the differences in their age, class, and religion, and with their respective temperaments and expectations. The voice of old, broken Molly is an impressive creation, and the narrative convincingly plunges the reader into a tumultuous and tender account of a tortured romance, though some of O'Connor's stylistic choices (notably abrupt tense and perspective shifts within Molly's head) impede narrative momentum and yield a reading experience that feels heavy and too hazy. (Feb.)
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From Booklist
In 1950s London, a drunken, broken-down old woman recalls her passionate love affair with a gifted playwright. O’Connor fictionalizes the real-life relationship between promising young actress Molly Allgood and tortured playwright J.M. Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World. When 18-year-old Molly joins the celebrated Abbey Theater ensemble in 1907, she quickly becomes enamored of the extremely talented but emotionally remote Synge. As the action stretches back and forth between post-WWII London and Edwardian Dublin, the bittersweet disconnect between the vital and passionate Molly of the past and the shuffling survivor of the present is heartrending. Although plenty of poetic license is taken in rendering this rumored love story, the emotional impact of the narrative rings true. --Margaret Flanagan

Review

“A great ambitious novel about love and loss. Joseph O’Connor has the magic touch, and I can’t imagine many better—or braver—novels coming out this year.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

“A brilliant novel.” —Joseph O’Neil, author of Netherland

“When I think of Ghost Light, the words climb over each other to be first in the queue: brilliant, beautiful, exhilarating, heartbreaking, masterly. It’s that good.” —Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

“It has an astonishing command of voice and period detail, and offers an intimacy with the lives of others that is rare in fiction.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

“A spellbinding read.” —Aisling Foster, The Times (London)

“Ghost Light is a tender and compassionate love story, and a fine stepping stone to the majesty of Synge.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Remarkable, radiant and captivating . . . On top of the biographical information concerning these two, Synge and his Molly, Joseph O’Connor has imposed a fictional overlay, and makes a vivid performance of it . . . Deeply and resolutely imagined, Ghost Light casts its heroine as a charming and robust, playful and wayward young girl, committed to the well-being of the rather difficult and gloomy JM Synge. Molly Allgood, in this version, has a good deal of Molly Bloom in her make-up, and a lively intelligence to boot . . . In this incarnation, [she] is a figure of great gaiety and aplomb; and O’Connor’s novel carries all the pungency and resonance of a particular era of the past.” —Patricoa Craig, The Independent

“A moving tale.” —The Sunday Telegraph

“An entertaining read that carries a touching tale.” —The Economist

“Masterful . . . With his previous novels, Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls, O’Connor carved out a unique way of playing his storyteller’s hand over a wide landscape, with the use of invented documentation and textual adventure. Ghost Light brings that achievement to a new dimension, more specifically located and yet all the more masterful in its management of re-imagined lives and the time they inhabit . . . The writing is lyrical and moving.’ —Hugo Hamilton, The Financial Times

“With his usual deftness and intelligence, O’Connor brings to life the intense love affair between young actress Molly Allgood and the great Irish playwright JM Synge . . . Brilliant.” —The Daily Mirror

“Joseph O’Connor’s seventh novel, Ghost Light, will give days of pleasure to tens and tens of thousands of readers. It is a great love story, with extras: a virtuoso display of literary talent, a tribute to the Hiberno-English heritage of lore and lyricism and an interpretation of the Irish literary revival as the fruit of settler and native, Protestant and Catholic . . . One of the novel’s great achievements is not just to display imaginative power but also to show how the imagination works . . . A stroke of genius.” —Adrian Frazier, Irish Times

“Engrossing stuff . . . Beautifully written and charming.” —The Independent on Sunday

“What shines in the end is O’Connor’s precise style bolstered by quick flashes of his wicked humour. Ghost Light is a careful, thoughtful story, the worlds of which are impeccably rendered.” —Irish Examiner

“Ghost Light is a sad and stirring story of love and loss, and O’Connor skillfully brings to life a brief affair that burned brightly and for Molly, was never extinguished.” —Claire O’Mahony, Irish Sunday Tribune

“A tender, haunting tale . . . An original and moving love story.” —Marie Claire

“O’Connor has fashioned a deeply moving, beautifully written story . . . Admirers of his writing will take pleasure not only in the ambitious range of Ghost Light and its depth of feeling but also in the nods in the direction of the author’s immediately preceding novels, Redemption Falls, and, before that, Star of the Sea . . . Ghost Light stands up to scrutiny on its own terms. It is a profoundly sad story, but triumphant.” —Scotland Herald

“The author displays typical imaginative virtuosity and emotional depth . . . As well as being impressively well crafted, the novel is wreathed in language of Joycean richness. [O’Connor’s] prose is tuned to a singular lyrical frequency.” —The Sunday Times 

“Superbly written, magically evocative novel.” —The Scotsman

“Ghost Light is a spirited novel . . . Like her namesake Molly Bloom, Allgood is an earthy, wily and sexually magnetic creation but O’Connor’s real feat is in his careful deployment of Hiberno-English by which he not only doffs his cap to Synge but gives flesh and blood to Molly’s neglected life story.” —The Metro

“Ghost Light will give days of pleasure to tens and tens of thousands of readers. It is a great love story, with extras: a virtuoso display of literary talent, a tribute to the Hiberno-English heritage of lore and lyricism and an interpretation of the Irish literary revival as the fruit of settler and native, Protestant and Catholic . . . Brimming with sympathy and skill.” —Irish Times

“Joe O’Connor occupies a special place in Irish life. The novel is artfully constructed . . . O’Connor’s evocation of such a difficult, morbid and yet morally beautiful man through the memory of an earthy and vivacious woman is remarkably ambitious and imaginative. Ghost Light is full of . . . sly pleasures and there is a great deal of broad comedy.” —The Irish Independent

“Lyrical and moving.” —The Sunday Tribune

Most helpful customer reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
EXQUISITE!
By Charlotte Vale-Allen
This is one of the most beautifully written and well-conceived novels I've read in a very, very long time. This not a quick fast-paced item nowadays called "a read." It is an honest-to-goodness book. It cannot be skimmed, constructed as it is with a glorious use of language that is sheer pleasure, along with characters so intimately crafted that it is actually wrenching to come to the end and be separated from both the writing and the people. For those who aren't in a tearing hurry to get through the next item on their bedside reading stack, this is a dream of a book. I am still marveling over the wealth of detail, past and present, all of it stemming from the mind of a touching, irritating, fully realized, funny, rude, gifted and good-hearted, utterly remarkable woman. Don't miss this! This is a keeper, a book to be reread. Most highly recommended.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A Novel of Grand Scope and Beauty
By Fairbanks Reader - Bonnie Brody
Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor is a brilliant and complex book. It is one of the best books I have read in the last five years. The language is poetic and hallucinatory and this is a book where one can't skip passages or lines. Every word is necessary and the whole is a gift put together with the greatest care and love.

The novel is about a grand love affair between Molly Allgood, an actress (stage name Maire O'Neill) and the playwright John Synge, most well-known for his play, Playboy of the Western World. The book starts out in 1952 on the streets of post-war London. Molly, 67 years old, is walking the cold blustery city and freezing. She lives in a hovel and drinks too much. She is hungry and cold, going from one sheltered spot to another and hallucinating from the the alcohol, her hunger and her freezing. She is on her way to a BBC radio reading and on her way she remembers, in broken dream sequences, her relationship with John Synge.

Molly and John Synge had an affair and at the time of their affair she was eighteen years old and he was thirty-six. John was very ill, most likely with lymphoma but perhaps tuberculosis or some other lung disease. He had one neck surgery after another. He lived only two years after they met. They came from opposite sides of the tracks. Molly was an actress who was from a mixed marriage - protestant and catholic - and she worked with her mother in a drapery shop. John came from old money and was of protestant background. He had a symbiotic relationship with his mother which made his relationship with Molly doomed from the start as his mother would not permit him to bring Molly home and threatened to cut off his trust fund should he marry her.

The book goes back and forth in time from 1952 London to 1905 Dublin where Molly and John were involved in a theater group. John was the resident playwright for William Yeats and the Grand Dame of the theater was Lady Augusta Gregory. Molly was an actress in the theater troupe. In those days it was very risqué for women to act.

Molly and John had to keep their affair a secret because John was terribly afraid of anyone finding out. He and Molly met on trains and traveled to Wicklow together for a vacation but acted like they did not know one another in Dublin. The affair was tender and poignant. John was very ill and the marriage was doomed from the start, never to be realized. They remained engaged until John's death. John called Molly his Pegeen, his Changeling girl.

We travel with Molly to the United States where she acted after John's death. She recollects the plays she was in and the popularity she had. She ended up marrying a philandering husband and had two children, a son who died during World War II and a daughter from whom she is semi-estranged because she can not get along with her son-in-law.

The novel contains imagined letters and real letters between the two lovers and hallucinatory memories from Molly's desperate mind as she tries to stay alive despite the difficult circumstances she finds herself in. My favorite parts of the novel are when it travels to 1905 and the reader gets to participate in the acting troupe with the great Synge and Yeats.

Parts of this novel are true and other parts are fictional according to Mr. O'Connor. Mr. O'Connor grew up in Dublin near the Synge house and was fascinated by the playwright's life. This novel is the outcome of his fascination. In some ways it reminded me of the poetic beauty of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. Sense of place is very important. This is a novel with grand scope and great beauty, one that will not be forgotten by any lover of literature.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Literary and Luscious
By Jill I. Shtulman
Joseph O'Connor has fashioned a marvelous novel, a reimaging of the love affair of John Millington Synge - the famous playwright of Playboy of the Western World and other fine works - and the younger, less well-stationed Molly Allgood, who performed under the name of Maire O'Neill.

"Certain biographers will want to beat me with a turf shovel," O'Connor states in his aftermath. Indeed, in reading that aftermath, this is not the book for those who are seeking a historically-correct look into these principals. It is definitely fiction.

But what fiction it is! It sings, glows, and at times, reads like sheer poetry. There are hints of James Joyce in the stream-of-consciousness. It all flows from the title Ghost Light, which O'Connor defines later in the book, "An ancient superstition among people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own play."

And within the confines of this novel, these "ghosts" definitely do. The "play" begins in 1952; Molly, now quite old and penurious, is in London where is to record a radio play for the BBC studios. There, in an alcoholic haze, she muses upon the highlights of her life: as an actress at Abbey Theatre of Dublin, her acquaintance with Yeats, and most of all, her love affair with the much-older John M. Synge.

She remembers that Synge was "a man who could see into things - very ordinary things...His imagination, or soul, or whatever province of his mind was hungry for the sustaining rain of the world, would soak in the storms of his own haunted strangeness, and the berries would bloom, and they were what they were, and if the tendrils were peculiar, and some of them wild, the fruits were so shockingly luscious and potent that the thirsty were willing to savour the bitter for the sake of the concomitant sweet."

Ah, poetry! By using the documented framework of Synge - his ascension to the top of his craft, his complicated relationship with his widowed mother (who strongly disapproved of his "liaison"), his engagement to Molly, his early death at age 37 - Mr. O'Connor expands his story, weaving fiction in with the fact. His portrayal of Molly - playful, wayward, with a spirited independence - is sublime. And then, Mr. O'Connor goes further, also weaving some highlights of the Abbey Theatre and the cruelty of class-consciousness into his tapestry. A most amazing book - and very recommended by this reader.

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^^ Download PDF The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, by John Gray

Download PDF The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, by John Gray

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The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, by John Gray

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A searching, captivating look at the persistence of myth in our modern world

"By nature volatile and discordant, the human animal looks to silence for relief from being itself while other creatures enjoy silence as their birthright."

In a book by turns chilling and beautiful, John Gray continues the thinking that made his Straw Dogs such a cult classic.

Gray draws on an extraordinary array of memoirs, poems, fiction, and philosophy to re-imagine our place in the world. Writers as varied as Ballard, Borges, Conrad, and Freud have been mesmerized by forms of human extremity―experiences that are on the outer edge of the possible or that tip into fantasy and myth. What happens to us when we starve, when we fight, when we are imprisoned? And how do our imaginations leap into worlds way beyond our real experiences?

The Silence of Animals is consistently fascinating, filled with unforgettable images and a delight in the conundrum of human existence―an existence that we decorate with countless myths and ideas, where we twist and turn to avoid acknowledging that we too are animals, separated from the others perhaps only by our self-conceit. In the Babel we have created for ourselves, it is the silence of animals that both reproaches and bewitches us.

• Sales Rank: #866149 in Books
• Brand: Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Published on: 2013-06-04
• Released on: 2013-06-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.47" h x .88" w x 6.03" l, .76 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• Used Book in Good Condition

Review

“Gray's godless mysticism asks us to look outside ourselves and simply see. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds . . . Sometimes I think John Gray is the great Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age. What he offers is a gloriously pessimistic cultural analysis, which rightly reduces to rubble the false idols of the cave of liberal humanism.” ―Simon Critchley, The Los Angeles Review of Books

“[Gray's is] a powerful message, and not without elements of profundity. And it is conveyed with eloquence of language and dignity of thought.” ―Robert W. Merry, The National Interest

“Gray's fans should find much here to please them. The range of literary, historical and philosophical extracts--from Conrad and Zweig to Borges and John Ashbery, and from Nietzsche and Freud to Robinson Jeffers and Czeslaw Milosz, to name only a few--is broad and deep. Gray's own utterances are by turns characteristically dark, audacious and outrageous.” ―Caspar Henderson, The Telegraph

“Silence of Animals is a beautifully written book, the product of a strongly questioning mind. It is effectively an anthology with detailed commentary, setting out one rich and suggestive episode after another, each of which becomes only more suggestive by the juxtaposition.” ―Philip Hensher, The Spectator

About the Author

John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, and Straw Dogs. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.

Most helpful customer reviews

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
What to do when faith deserts us?
By Acorn
This new book by John Gray is a meditation on how we deal with the world when our faith in progress and human betterment deserts us. It explores the theme through the prisms of literature, art, philosophy, and to a lesser extent, psychology rather than being a scientific or historical study. As with all of Gray's work, it has some telling insights and observations, and ranges over a fascinating mix of the familiar and obscure to give depth and substance to his ideas.

The Silence of Animals is arranged in three parts. The first looks at the idea of progress and how people's belief in it has disintegrated when faced with human barbarity. The two world wars left ruin in their wake and Gray looks at the reactions of writers such as J G Ballard, Norman Lewis and Stefan Zweig to the rapid disappearance of civilised behaviour in the brutality of war. Barbarism can also emerge from economic crisis: the Great Depression and the inflation in inter-war Germany, and the financial crash of 2008, each destroyed the wealth of countless families. They rendered years of faith in saving and building a future utterly meaningless, even as the alchemists of finance breathed a sigh of relief over their canapés at finding their own fortunes unscathed.

Gray was previously an academic political theorist and he sees authoritarian politics, whether of the left or right, as an attempt to deny the chaos of reality and to fake a sense of order. People like certainty and the dream of a better day to come, and therein perhaps lies the appeal of those charlatans who would have us believe that they can plan and control our future.

In the end, progress is a myth because evolution is about survival, not about constant improvement. Gray characterises evolution as a process of drift rather than a rise to ever greater heights of rationality, peace and order.

In the second part of the book Gray looks at the ideas of Sigmund Freud and in particular his views on myth creation. Freud saw the internal self as forever at war between the forces of Eros (love, creativity) and Thanatos (hatred, destruction). Psychoanalysis can be seen as a process of coming to terms with this perpetual disorder. We might be driven by unconscious forces over which we have no control, but by accepting and trying to recognise them we can attain some degree of autonomy in our lives.

All our constructions of the world are myths of one kind or another. Gray rejects Jung's idea of universal myths and notes that museums are full of old gods that people once thought were eternal and immortal. Our stories about the world change all the time, as do we, and part of Freud's work was to reconcile us with our ever-emergent selves.

Science appears to be different and Gray makes a neat distinction between scientific method, which tests our beliefs against facts, and the way we usually operate which is to select the facts that reinforce our beliefs. We are an incorrigibly irrational lot. But even science is myth-like: any scientific theory only works for a certain period of time before being replaced by another or being rendered irrelevant by a new paradigm. Our understanding of the world is thus made up of changing theories and stories, often inconsistent and sometimes plain barmy, and none of them ever fully explains everything. Spending your days searching for a theory of everything? Get a life.

Given that the world is chaotic and that our stories and theories about it are patchy and ephemeral, how can we best engage with the world? This is the theme of the final section of the book. Here Gray investigates how people have sought to look at the world from different perspectives and analyses two extraordinary books by J A Baker, who tried to see the world through the eyes of animals. He also looks at how people have pursued silence and used meditation, exercises that try to take us out of the hubbub of the world and the manic chatter in our heads. The value of these activities is that they change us and our perceptions of (and enjoyment of) the world.

The world view depicted by Gray might seem to presume pessimism and often Gray's thoughts appear this way, but accepting the chaos of the world and our inability to fully grasp it can also be refreshing and liberating, and can heighten our enjoyment of ourselves, other people and the world about us. Being alive becomes interesting in itself.

There is no discussion of the French existentialist philosophers, and surprisingly no discussion of Buddhism, even though these two have a lot in common with Gray's perspective. The final section of the book felt incomplete as a result. There is also far too little about the human need for certainty in life and how this blinds us to the greater joys of the world. In the first part of the book he consigns the progress myth to the rubbish bin, but if we have to live by myths is the progress one so bad? Public policy, education systems and charitable aid are all built on the lie of progress but they have produced some positive social results. Gray never considers whether some myths might be preferable to others and how we might decide that.

There is a wealth of engrossing detail in this book, supplemented by extensive notes. His exploration of some of the lesser known byways in literature whetted my appetite to pursue them further. Even if you find Gray's views unconvincing, the journey with him is well informed and never dull. This work will inspire you to reflect on how you understand yourself and the world in which you have randomly arrived.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A masterpiece of philosophy. It demolishes the modernity's so-called certainties and moves towards an embrace of disorder.
By Umer Vakil
This collection of essays was a dense read, but it must be read more than once. I couldn't help but underlining a couple of lines - simply so I could return to them later. Their value comes from the incredible eloquence with which the dominant ideologies of Western history are critiqued. For Gray, in the end, the only solace humans can find is in contemplation - but not as a key to seek redemption from being human , but as a path towards new perspectives on a disorderly world.

What I love is his ability to unify such large bodies of thoughts, underline their underlying ideas, express them - and then highlight the conflict between these philosophies with other philosophies - or their (oft non-obvious) common assumptions.

His most important contribution to thought is the succinct take-down of one of the biggest myths of the modern world: that progress, be it material or moral, is at heads with religion. For him, progress is simply an extension of the Christian belief in history's trajectory converging to an event. Even the Socratic tradition of finding redemption in Knowledge - or in that case - Science, is also a belief in eventual salvation. This is in opposition to the ancient Egyptians or Greeks, who thought that "nothing was new under the sun". Ancient pagans did not see the world divided between "civilized" in tune with progress, and the "savage", not in tune with it - but as humanity as a single entity always at war with itself.

To Gray, Liberal Humanism happens to be myth, a strange mythological force that is denial of its own mythological status due its scorn for religion. Humanism as a philosophy takes a few claims as self-evident and bases itself on these axioms: "that a rational life is devoid of myths... that moral progress, even if incremental, is possible...that humans are inherently freedom loving", although an observation of history's embrace of countless tyrants almost immediately refutes this central axiom. Fortunately, history has no goal or direction and these assumptions can easily be shown to be defective through simple reasoning by the likes of philosophers such as Gray.

Of course, these two dominant thoughts are only the unique targets in a few essays. Freud's and Nietzsche's anti-humanism is looked at with far more sympathy - a philosophy embracing internal struggle, and not settling for ultimate salvation. Freud’s philosophy is at complete odds with the Socratic tradition: Socrates thought that logic and thought can lead to self-understanding, leading to goodness, while Freud maintained that the mind is inherently illogical - and redemption through knowledge too is mythological ideal. These aren’t abstract debates restricted to earlier decades, modern social scientists - economists, psychologists and so on feel that the science can capture the intricacies of human thought, and that this understanding itself constitutes progress. The same can be said of the Positive Psychology and New Age movements, the Romantic movement described by T.E. Hulme… all that believe that humans have an endless potential that can be utilized. Most dominant ideologies are dissected by Gray, and either partially embraced or brutally dismissed.

I have read some reviews that claim that the economic effects of progress such as environmental destruction etc. are ignored by Gray - but this is a philosophical treatise, and it doesn’t hold that those factors are not important. In fact, I’m sure he has covered these aspects in his other books.

A review of all the ideas in this book would take pages and pages - but no summary will ever do this book justice. I’ve done a rather poor job covering them, almost deliberately since summaries tend to be ineloquent and ugly.

The crust of this book and its mission of contemplation (though not maybe exactly the contemplation Gray had in mind) can be taken by Gray’s mention of J.A. Baker in his essay “Another Sunlight”. Baker tried to observe a hawk he was watching and enter its field of vision, looking at the world a new light “The hawk was Baker’s point of exit from the human world. ‘I have always longed to be a part the outward life, … Seen through a hawk’s eyes the works of humans had the look of natural things.” Gray says: “People who love other creatures are often accused of anthropomorphize them. This was not true of Baker. Rather than anthropomorphize other species, Baker tried the experiment of anthropomorphize himself. Seeing the world as he imagined hawks might see it, he was able at times to be something other than he had been. He too raced to oblivion, losing himself as he followed the peregrine.”

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
Gray's Anatomy of Civilizationj
By Cotton Mather
That Gray puts to bed the rationalist's love affair with humanism is less important than the fact that he euthanizes what is left of faith as well.

Ignore Thomas Nagel's NY Times book review. As much as I like Nagel's work, his review is off considerably. He claims that Gray inserts far too much secondary quotation from other books. This is not really even a matter of opinion. It is simply false. Gray uses what is necessary to convey his ideas within an intellectual's context. Nagel also claims that Gray hammers away for no reason as there are many examples of progress available. Well, Nagel just walks into the trap here as Gray explains why such examples are part of a greater myth.

Gray has carefully explained the nature of our wishful thinking and, without ideological bias or academic rancor, he has done his part for disenchantment. Yet, he has not, in any way, attempted to create a nihilist's playbook. He allows much for the advance of meaning.

Really--a marvelous book. It deserves much more attention than it seems to be getting.

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> Free PDF Aquella Ultima Noche: (The Last Night) (Spanish Edition), by India Grey

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Cristiano Maresca, piloto de Fórmula 1 de fama mundial, siempre pasaba la noche antes de una carrera en brazos de una hermosa mujer…

Cuatro años atrás, esa mujer fue Kate Edwards. La noche que pasó con Cristiano despertó sus sentidos y le hizo experimentar un placer inimaginable. Sin embargo, al día siguiente, el indomable Cristiano tuvo un accidente que estuvo a punto de costarle la vida. Poco después, Kate descubrió que estaba esperando un hijo suyo…

• Sales Rank: #7301370 in Books
• Published on: 2012-01-03
• Original language: Spanish
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 6.62" h x .42" w x 4.21" l,
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
India Grey was just thirteen years old when she first sent away for the Mills & Boon Writers’ Guidelines. She recalls the thrill of getting the large brown envelope with its distinctive logo through the letterbox and kept these guidelines for the next ten years, tucking them carefully inside the cover of each new diary in January and beginning every list of New Year’s resolutions with the words 'Start Novel'. But she got there in the end!

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Tracing the career of Rainer Maria Rilke, a definitive biography combines detailed interpretations of his life with an intimate reading of his verse and prose and shows how he grew from an ambitious versifier into a great poet.

• Sales Rank: #1733935 in Books
• Published on: 1996-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.50" h x 6.25" w x 1.75" l,
• Binding: Hardcover
• 639 pages

Amazon.com Review
Combining empathetic insight into the poet's life with intimate understanding of the poet's work, exhaustive research with a storyteller's flair, Freedman creates portraits of the young Rilke living out the poetic imagination, an older Rilke realizing his calling as one of the century's greatest poetic visionaries,culminating in such works as the Duino Elegies and Letters to a Young Poet.

From Publishers Weekly
Freedman, emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton and author of a biography of Hermann Hesse, notes in this thorough and thoughtful study of Rilke that he will follow "this tortured man" as he evolves from "a versifier consumed by ambition to one of the great poets of our time." He delivers on half that promise, by bringing to life the ambitious versifier far more successfully than he does the great poet. Rilke was born into a German-speaking family in Prague in 1875 and soon developed a pattern of illness-real and imagined-that persisted for the rest of his life. Other defining traits include a fawning pursuit of aristocrats (usually female), infatuations with Russia and Italy, intense love affairs (usually preceded by letter-writing campaigns) that ended in six months and a fondness for the company of artists rather than writers. He was, briefly, Rodin's secretary in Paris, and his wife-whom he soon abandoned, along with their daughter-was also a sculptor. Other familiar figures who appear are Andre Gide, Eleanora Duse and Franz Werfel. Readers will probably find Rilke unappealing, but Freedman skillfully reveals the various myths and personas the poet created about himself and perhaps even believed, and shows how in his masterpiece, The Duino Elegies, he shaped them into a new aesthetic "vision." Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Rilke's poems Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, among others, make him one of the great poets of the century. His day-to-day living, on the other hand, is quite uneventful and not particularly admirable, and Freedman (Rilke: A Biography, Random, 1988) does not enliven it. Rilke's passionate commitment to art was counterbalanced by a pathological incapacity for true intimacy that slipped into cold cruelty and a weakness for the ease and favor of aristocratic patronage, travel (with a tendency to misunderstand and sentimentalize the cultures he saw), depression, and illness. Freedman proficiently documents the movements, affairs, and preoccupations that served as raw material and provocation for Rilke's art. Yet the author gives us no real insight into Rilke's life or work. It is in the poems and other creations where the reader will meet the man. For academic libraries. [Rilke's newly published Uncollected Poems are reviewed on p. 116.-Ed.]-Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
--Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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28 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
a postcard of a church
By Paul Agostinelli
Some biographers get inside the spiritual life of their subjects and are able to capture its intimate movements in such a way that the life takes on a magical coherence and wholeness. Others, less sympathetically endowed, are content to record external circumstances and events, with perhaps some brief overtures toward explaining inner motives and passions. One would think a poet of Rilke's fierce inwardness demands primarily the former form of biography - and he does - but the latter form also offers some interesting insights, especially for readers who might be unfamiliar with the milieu he lived and worked in. This biography is very much in the latter camp. Freedman's prose suffers from frequent bouts of groaningly bad academese ("His words adumbrate the divine tension between Word and World" - yuck!), but his narrative does give the imaginative reader some purchase on the shaping forces behind many of Rilke's most powerful works. The last few hundred pages are something of a slog since you know that felicitous insights into Rilke's inner life (and there are some) will be consistently overwhelmed by a rather distant-sounding reportage of his travels, housing troubles, and publishing concerns. For a poet whose mission was to transform external vicissitude into internal truth... the effect is something like viewing a postcard of a church. Rilke was notorious for flooding his lovers with passion before withdrawing from their intimacy, and in a way Freedman, who never really seems to get under Rilke's skin (although it it is clear he would like to), takes his place among those spurned souls.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Extraordinary tale of an extraordinary man
By A Customer
This biography sensitively and thoroughly investigates the life of Rilke. We follow not only his life's events, but his intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and poetic development, all of which are closely intertwined. Freedman himself writes the tale so well--it is a pleasure to read! The book features plenty of photographs of Rilke, his family and friends. Rilke was a complicated and troubled man, but the wonder is seeing how out of such human frailties arose a transcendent body of work.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
messy
By Malte Laurids Brigge
This is a sprawling, lazy account. It was moderately useful as a complement to Donald Prater's far more concentrated 'A ringing glass', but if I hadn't read that book first I wouldn't have formed much of a picture of Rilke's life. There are a few interesting stories found here which don't appear in the other book, but on the whole it is totally inferior.

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