This pleasant memoir of the 1950s and '60s is an ode to Manhattan's unique brand of chaotic energy, by one of the island's adopted daughters. Manhattan was the Emerald City for Cantwell, who told of her New Hampshire childhood in An American Girl (1992). Cantwell is a committed denizen of Greenwich Village (``not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it'') from the moment she arrives as a hope-filled graduate of Connecticut College. Her series of Village residences form the framework for this quiet, occasionally humorous, occasionally painful tale, the objective correlative of her passing from single aspiring writer to young married, mother, and divorced career woman (she is now an editorial board member of the New York Times). Cantwell is remarkably tolerant of her youthful selfher New York pretensions, her social anxietiesand even of her husband, a high-flying literary agent who left her (with two children) for his secretary. Cantwell's joysthe pleasure she takes in turning out fashion copy for Mademoiselle, meeting Alice B. Toklas in Paris with her husbandare laced with unhappinessthe inability to form an identity apart from her husband, her suicidal madness after the birth of her first daughter. With admirable restraint, Cantwell spares us the endless emotional navel-gazing (and feminist cant) that often afflicts such memoirs of self-discovery (or self-invention). At the same time, however, it deprives her tale of juice. Her colleagues at Mademoiselle and later Vogue are mere sketches; and she seems to accept unquestioningly the apparently sudden and full resolution of various emotional difficulties (e.g., her profound discomfort with sex disappears once she discovers ``what it is for,'' i.e., making babies). One longs to know what her warm, patient psychiatrist, Dr. Franklin, thought of these episodes. Still, Cantwell's lovely prose and passions for Manhattan, motherhood, and work will resonate for many women.
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-74441-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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