Word: vallentine
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...WELLS: PROPHET OF OUR DAY (338 pp.)-Antonina Vallentin-John...
...Wells: Prophet of Our Day appears four years after his death in 1946. Poland-born Antonina Vallentin, a naturalized Frenchwoman, has two qualifications for the job: 1) she knew Wells, 2) she is practiced in writing books about famous men (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, Heinrich Heine, Gustav Stresemann, Mirabeau, Goya). With H. G. Wells, she comes to grips with her first eccentric Briton-and emerges from the struggle wearing the pained, puzzled expression of a fighter who has been repeatedly but deftly rabbit-punched...
...Goes There? The English, notes harassed Biographer Vallentin, look upon Alice in Wonderland, with its "strong undercurrent of cruelty," as an ideal book for children. But how could even the English have missed the "curiously sadistic strain" that she found in some of Wells's very first work, his fancy for cataclysmic upheavals and devastating horrors? Biographer Vallentin wonders. And yet, to all appearances, he was a hearty, jovial man, bursting with a robust humor that Miss Vallentin tries in vain to reflect, and inspired with a sense of duty to mankind that she manages to get across very...
...rare friendly moments, his father nicknamed him "Mr. Hurricane." The simple outline of Mirabeau's doings becomes a kind of epic of frustration whose misery Madame Vallentin, engrossed in her psychological analyses, does not seem to appreciate. He was ugly, and so he was the butt of the brilliant nobility, and a burden to his father who was at first ashamed of him and then, as Mirabeau developed as a writer, jealous...
Secret Adviser. Such was the background and preparation of the man who, in a crisis, was called upon to save France. He nearly did it. Author Vallentin makes it very plain that in the last moments before the Terror there was nobody in the Assembly except Mirabeau who had the confidence of the people. He became a secret adviser of the king. It was then too late; Mirabeau's strength was gone, and his advice was not followed, or was accepted only in part. The queen, with "her superficial and malicious intelligence, which excelled in seizing on slight slips...