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The Hemingway Women

The Hemingway Women

List Price: $16.95
Your Price: $11.53
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Neither fish nor fowl
Review: As an aficionado of literary biographies, I was intrigued by this one's unique concept. In the end though, I can't say it's more than an honorable failure.

If the idea was to enrich our understanding of Hemingway by examining him from these feminine angles, it simply doesn't work. The portrait of the author that emerges is less focused and cohesive than that available from any of several orthodox biographies. (Kenneth S. Lynn's seems to me the best single volume study, although some of his theories are less persuasive than others.) And if the real subjects are the women, one has to ask: what was the point? Except for Martha Gellhorn, an intrepid war journalist who has been given her own biography, none of them ever did anything of real interest (or have anything much in common) except become involved with Hemingway. There is a fascinating book to be written about the psychology of literary "groupies" but that doesn't seem to be what the author had in mind.

I also wonder if her bias in favor of the women hasn't distorted some facts. While her three-dimensional portrait of Hemingway's mother is a much-needed corrective to his rabid antipathy, she seems to place an unprecedented amount of faith in the credulity of Adriana Ivanich's memoir. (i.e. Kert says, apparently on its authority, that Adriana's drawings for Hemingway's dust jackets were so good that Scribner's selected them without even knowing who she was. Others say that they were so inept that they had to be professionally redrawn before they could be of any use.) Also, she refers to Zelda Fitzgerald's death as taking place in a "hospital", as if she were recovering from an appendectomy rather than having been institutionalized as insane.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Insight to Hemingway
Review: Bernice Kert has given me my first true understanding of who Hemingway was and why he did the things he did. His choice of women, more so the women he married and the woman who gave birth to him are phsycoanalysis at it best. I now see the "Peter Pan" in Hemingway, not the masculine adventurer,hunter and "man's man". I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and recommend it highly.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Insight to Hemingway
Review: Bernice Kert has given me my first true understanding of who Hemingway was and why he did the things he did. His choice of women, more so the women he married and the woman who gave birth to him are phsycoanalysis at it best. I now see the "Peter Pan" in Hemingway, not the masculine adventurer,hunter and "man's man". I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and recommend it highly.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A revealing light on the life of a writer and his muses
Review: This book, written with style and interest, is a sound ,balanced and well documented research on the lives and marriages of Ernst Hemingway with this four wives , Hadley Richardson (portayed in A Moveable Feast), Pauline Pfeiffer (Green Hills of Africa), Martha Gelhorn -a writer herself- (The fifth column) and Mary Welsh (A dangerous summer), inteligently ilustrated, amusing and covering also his famous lovers: Adriana Ivancich (his Renata in Across the river and under the trees) and Jane Kendall Mason (Brett Ashley herself in the Sun Also Rises) and the affairs that ended and started his marriages leaving a lasting pattern in his literature. It's an amusing and interesting book for those who love, hate or ignore Hemingway. It also explores his difficult and influencing relationship with his mother.


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