A thoroughly charming memoir of a childhood in Italy between the world wars. The English have always loved Italy, especially Tuscany. Nourished by romantic visions and illusions, they—ve flocked there to buy up large tracts of land and working farms. Aubrey Waterfield, the artist, was one of many such. He purchased La Fortezza della Brunella, an imposing 16th-century castle set on a hill, in 1916. With him he brought his wife, son John, and five-year-old daughter Carinthia (who became Kinta Beevor). Their Anglo-American coterie included only the very best of families and such luminaries as Bernard Berenson and D.H. Lawrence. The children were more fascinated, though, by their father’s fanciful “garden in the sky,” a splendid Eden perched on the castle’s roof. The castle—from its immense kitchen and sumptuous odors to the legend of a massacred garrison still haunting the place—became the focal point of life. By her own admission, Beevor’s childhood was formed more by her contact with the locals and an imperious aunt than with her mother. Humorous, witty, and insightful comments abound here on the cultural differences separating the English and the Italians: e.g., regarding personal relationships, the rearing of children, and the preparation and consumption of food. Speaking of her parents, the late Beevor (who died in 1995) writes, “They had all of the luxuries of life but none of the necessities . . . they seldom had money for those things that their relations considered the basis of civilized life.” Reflecting on the Italians, she observes (as have many others): “Fundamentally, the Italian wants to give pleasure.” And: “The Italians, unlike the Germans, were saved from the worst effects of ideology by their own cynicism about politics and the press,” though the author does detail the cruel barbarism of the Fascists and Nazis during WWII. The nostalgic, enchanting book closes on a note of infinite sadness in remembering a way of life now lost. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40462-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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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