Running With The Bulls: My Years With The Hemingways

Rating:
Summary: I simply could not put the book down.
Review: "By January 1962 I was convinced that I was expecting Brendan Behan's child."

Yes, this is a book about Ernest Hemingway but it is also about Spain, Cuba, Ireland, New York, Montana, Fidel Castro, Norman Mailer, James Joyce, bullfighting, hunting, writing, reading, the Hemingway wives, children and grandchildren. It's a book about depression, alcoholism, mania, sex change and genius. It's also a book about an Irish woman who lived a life stranger than fiction.

If you are a Hemingway fan you might or might not want to read this book. Its contents will forever change the way you think about the great man - he was human after all.

Thanks and prayers to you Valerie Hemingway.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and impressive
Review: I must disagree with the PW reviewer who commented that Valerie Hemingway's wonderfuil book "lacks a memorable or compelling portrait of Ernest Hemingway himself." This is far from the case. RUNNING WITH THE BULLS seems to me a masterpiece of biographical writing. Although she only knew him during his fial two years on earth, Valerie knew him pretty well, and he fell in love with her, showing her sides to himself that illuminated the rest. He was not always the strutting, macho "old man," not with Valerie Danby-Smith. She was a young Irish secretary who wanted to burst out of the convent-educated world of high-echelon Guinness secretarial staff, so she went to Spain and met the actress Beverly Bentley (from Mike Todd Jr's SCENT OF MYSTERY, the first and last film made in "Smell-O-Vision" and eventually the Hemingway clan who were there for the bullfights.

I loved the way she was able in a single page to shade in all sorts of information about Hemingway--the authors and artists he admired, the kinds of food he preferred, his difficulties writing what became THE DANGEROUS SUMMER. She was in the habit, she tells us, of writing down notes every time she saw Hemingway, and she uses these judiciously. I do feel she had some bone to pick about A E Hotchner, I can't make out what it was. She has an agenda going on that's for sure, and "Hotch" is not on her happy list.

It's really three books in one because not only does Valerie describe Ernest Hemingway (and to a lesser degree Mary, his wife and eventually widow) better than previous biographers, but she also tells us all about two other men in her life--the Irish playwright Brendan Behan, and Gregory Hemingway, the tragically transvestite youngest son of Ernest, whom Valerie insanely married some years after Papa's suicide. He led her a merry chase all right, but they had four children and moved to Montana, eventually divorcing once Gregory turned dangerous. He later had a sex change and became Gloria Hemingway, and died in a women's prison in 1995. As she says, quoting from Ford Madox Ford's novel THE GOOD SOLDIER, "This is the saddest story I have ever known."

Rating:
Summary: Explores new territory
Review: I purchased and read this book because of my intense interest in the life of Ernest Hemingway. Memoirs by his family members or friends often disappoint, but I was impressed with this one. Valarie Hemingway writes well and sheds new light on Hemingway's last years, leading up to his suicide. Her tumultuous marriage to Ernest's troubled son Gregory is fully and truthfully explored here for the first time, and that alone is worth the price of admission. Running With The Bulls is an interesting and worthwhile look at the Hemingway family from a fresh perspective.

Rating:
Summary: Touching Memoir
Review: This memoir is beautifully written and very special in many ways. As we all know the life of the E. Hemingway is both fascinating and tragic. Valerie shares historical information that has never previously been disclosed and she shares her adventures and life with the Hemingways with poise and true tenderness. I found the reading captivating. Many thanks to her for sharing her intimate perspective.

Rating:
Summary: Pamplona and Beyond
Review: Valerie Hemingway has written a superb memoir with sensitivity and insight into a complex man and his world. Writing about Ernest Hemingway, she strikes a difficult balance between adoration and objectivity. Her prose is pleasing--sweet in places--sometimes humorous, and altogether compelling. Valerie Hemingway's often forlorn childhood in Ireland is interesting, and the unlikely confluence of this convent girl and the macho author is fascinating. On top of that comes a romance with Brendan Behan, Ernest Hemingways's suicide, and Valerie's eventual marriage to Hemingway's son, Gregory, who turns out to be a transvestite. Valerie Hemingway spent 28 years involved with the Hemingway family, and her observations and comments are important additions to the lore about Ernest Hemingway, his friends, enemies, wives and children. "Running With the Bulls" is not happy reading in many spots, but it is always engaging.

Rating:
Summary: A Moving Memoir
Review: Valerie Hemingway's account of the last years of Ernest Hemingway's life, and his suicide that affected her in so many ways, is magnificent. She catches the author's insecurities as his abilities fail along with his eyesight. She records his obsession with suicide, countered by his lust for life and his enjoyment of the international acclaim he had won.

But this is also about an extraordinary woman, filled with tenderness, steely in her courage, who loved and nursed and nurtured and sometimes fought several Hemingways, including Ernest, Mary, and her husband Gregory, Ernest's ill-starred son.

This is more than a memoir: it is a superb study of genius and madness, the betrayals of Ernest's sycophantic friends, and the pain and joy associated with a celebrity life.

This is an important work, a great contribution to our understanding of one of America's greatest authors, and his family. She has written with grace and courage and beauty, and were Ernest Hemingway alive, he would be celebrating her achievement.