A diverse work that requires readers to have multiple personalities—historians, worshippers of wealth and royalty,...
Wake (Kleinwort Benson: The History of Two Families in Banking, 1997, etc.) delivers a multiple biography of the fortunate Caton sisters, who flourished in Maryland and abroad, mostly during the Regency period and its aftermath.
Part Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, part serious history of privileged women in the 19th century, the author’s account will evoke sundry responses—admiration, alarm, boredom, bemusement, gratitude. Wake begins in 1816 when three of the sisters—all gorgeous, rich and mysterious—arrived in London, where they quickly became fixtures on the city’s social scene. The author then returns to the sisters’ family history. They were the granddaughters of Charles Carroll, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, a man who owned vast tracts of land, managed multiple fecund investments and lived into his 90s. Son-in-law Richard Caton married into the family in 1787, siring the titular sisters. Although Wake provides a few paragraphs about the family’s slaves, she seems to excuse the owners, praising their practice of keeping slave families together and administering only occasional whippings. Throughout, she prefers words like servant to the nastier synonym, and she never deals adequately with the odious reality that these women’s busy lives rested on a foundation of profound human suffering. Wake cuts back and forth, sister to sister, relying on a rich archive of unpublished letters among them, sometimes emphasizing their financial savvy and extensive wardrobes, sometimes their misfortunes of the heart—Marianne had a decades-long “relationship” with the Duke of Wellington, though Wake cannot confirm that they…“did it.”
A diverse work that requires readers to have multiple personalities—historians, worshippers of wealth and royalty, investment bankers and fashion freaks.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0761-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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