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Title: Opal: A Life of Enchantment, Mystery, and Madness by Kathrine Beck ISBN: 0-670-03145-3 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 23 October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (7 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Ms. Beck - You Must Step Back To See Opal's Soul
Comment: Ms. Beck is putting a microscope on a person that needs to be seen from one step back. You missed her essence. Rather than cast a critical gaze on Opal's writing skills, when it was written, when it was not, or if it indeed happened, Opal's story still stands, regardless of how it was created. I have read anything in print or on websites about her. Ms. Opal is truly magical and very meaningful to those of us who cherish her, regardless of how Ms. Beck formulates her "case".
Rating: 4
Summary: Impressive research; pathetic writing
Comment: As a person who deeply loved the book I read 25 years ago (Opal's childhood diaries), I was entranced with all the info in Beck's book, & impressed with her research.
But I have to say that the sloppiness of Beck's writing made me somewhat question the thoroughness of her research. What truly angered me, though, was that "Viking Press", associated with "Penguin Books", allowed a hardback book go to press with so many grammatical & syntactical errors! I often choose one book over another based on the reputation of the publisher, and until now, "Penguin Books" has represented for me the highest standard of quality.
If you're wondering if I'm exaggerating the extent of the writing errors, I'll give you an example. But I have to tell you that this is just one dozens (I wasn't obsessed to the point of counting them) in the book. What is amazing about this sentence is that it occurs ON THE LAST PAGE OF THE BOOK, one of the first places where you'd think that the copy-readers would focus their attention! "Her greatest success may have been her work with children, many of whom who genuine learned a love of nature from her." And no, the mistakes aren't mine. It's verbatim from the book that my sister spent $24.95 for my Christmas present.
Rating: 4
Summary: Flawed Jewel
Comment: Opal Whiteley front-loaded her life with some spectacular adventures before she was 30, with a few more to come after that. Without family connections, much formal education or any other advantages beyond a curiously compelling presence, she managed to hobnob with Los Angeles society ladies, Washington wives (at Cabinet level, no less, Indian potentates and English aristocrats.
As author of a book that purports to have been a diary written in childhood (as well as a previous volume of nature study), she managed to parlay her oddly phrased memories into teaching jobs, stints as houseguest to Boston Cabots, the British Raj and Roman Catholic convent.
With a miserable early life in Oregon put firmly behind her, Whiteley chose not to write about the bitterest truths of her upbringing: living for a time in a "house tent," attending a succession of schools, caring for several younger children while her father struggled to make a living as a logger and her mother died slowly of untreated breast cancer.
Instead, she wrote in quasi-King James prose about her love of nature -- most likely the only beauty and privacy in her hard childhood. If she had left it at that, Whiteley might have had one of many futures -- offers to teach in Boston private schools, sponsorship to attend Wellesley College, contracts for other books.
Unfortunately, she seems to have been an enfant sauvage in the East, where she went to make her literary fortune at age 20. There, the charismatic but inexperienced and unstable young woman was pulled in one wrong direction after another. Wishing, no doubt, not to own the hardships of her first 17 years or so, she started dropping hints that she was a changeling child, fostered to her Oregon family during some sort of intrigue that involved a family of pretenders to the long-deposed French monarchy. If she started out (during a California sojourn, during which she consulted at least one book with information about the family) merely playing with the idea of royal descent, the publicity surrounding the published diary seems to have driven her to embrace the "clews" to her mysterious birth as fact.
From publication onward, Whiteley met an amazing array of early-20th century characters -- some who tried to help and ended up overwhelmed and others who exploited the fragile young woman. Editors (including Amelia Earhart's husband) cut her bad deals; a cult of rich pseudo-Episcopalian Theosophists made her a near-prisoner. On the other hand, Herbert Hoover's wife introduced her to Washington society, and a department-store heiress as well as nuns in two countries faithfully sent money for what was often her sole support.
With a couple of exceptions, Whiteley seems to have formed no romantic relationships, rarely associated with people of her own age and cut herself off from family and most others she left behind in Oregon. Reading about her peripatetic life -- California boarding house to commune, to Cabot estate, to Greenwich Village, India and London -- the most striking constant is how profoundly alone she always was.
The story of Whiteley's near-triumph over childhood adversity is an engrossing one, with many unlooked for twists and turns, and biographer Beck does a good job of documenting most of the events of her subject's long life.
There are a few gaps -- some because Whiteley worked so hard to build alternate identities, some more puzzling. There is a lack of context about her mental illness, for instance. Whiteley spent around 50 years in a mental hospital in England, taken there after wandering London streets shouting and nearly destitute. Evidence from her letters and behavior long before this shows that she was at least emotionally troubled as young as age 17; the erratic incidents and writings increase in frequency and oddity as she aged. But Beck apparently did not consult a mental-health professional to suggest what may have been wrong with Whiteley (though manic behavior and schizophrenia both are mentioned) in the context of present-day or early-20th century standards of diagnosis and treatment. Since Whiteley did see a psychiatrist in the 1920s, I would like to know what a practitioner of his day might have made of her symptoms; citations from medical books of the time might have helped. I'd also like to know if her progress is classic or anomalous in light of what mental-health professionals now think of manic-depression or schizophrenia. Recent biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald -- another personally striking, creative woman who achieved fame in the 1920s -- have given us this context.
More disappointing still, the author does not seem to have delved into Whiteley's genealogy beyond the generation of her grandparents. Given her claims about a separate ancestry, and the much-remarked-upon darkness of her skin, hair and eyes, it would have been worthwhile to trace her family tree further than was done here. Why, for instance, did young Opal send off to the eugenics project in Cold Spring Harbor for forms about genetic traits? Did she expect to find Native American ancestors, or some other strain? And what would she have found if she had done a different kind of research? (On her maternal side, says her biographer, there are photos of ancestors who could be Sicilian or Arab. Some of Whiteley's admirers think she was part Asian.)
Despite these lacks, the book tells a poignant story about a woman who was hard to ignore and equally hard to help. I felt as if all Whiteley's words and actions were an attempt to shake some attention out of what must have seemed a cold and foreign world to this singular wanderer. In the end, nearly everyone failed her, her own bright young promise most of all.
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Title: Opal : The Journal of an Understanding Heart by Opal Whiteley ISBN: 0517885166 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 03 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley by Benjamin Hoff, Benjamim Hoff, Opal Whitely, Kathrine Beck ISBN: 0140237208 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: March, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera ISBN: 0152050167 Publisher: Harcourt Paperbacks Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $8.00 |
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Title: The Princes of Ireland : The Dublin Saga by EDWARD RUTHERFURD ISBN: 0385502869 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 02 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Guardian of the Horizon by Elizabeth Peters ISBN: 0066214718 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 30 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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