The marriage candidly portrayed here, with all its joys and failures, misunderstandings and misery, provides ample fodder...
Bittersweet memoir of a highly stressed marriage that somehow endured for nearly half a century.
Freelance editor and writer Brady (A Yankee Christmas: Feasts, Treats, Crafts, and Traditions of Wintertime New England, 1992, etc.) is the widow of Upton Brady, for many years the editor in chief of the Atlantic Monthly Press. Her story of their marriage opens with the scattering of his ashes near Woods Hole, Mass., in 2008, and promptly reveals that Upton was sometimes a mean drunk. In chapters that shift back and forth between the present and the past, Brady tells the story of their relationship beginning in 1956, when she was a Boston debutante and he a Harvard undergraduate. Although his Irish Catholic background did not match her mother’s vision of a son-in-law, they were married in 1962 and swiftly produced four children. Marriage and fathering children, it seems, was viewed by Upton as a cure for homosexuality. It was not. Although he had sex with men, was a heavy drinker, was verbally and physically abusive and was financially unstable and secretive, Brady loved him and stuck with him, believing he loved her too. Her discovery, shortly after his death, of gay pornography hidden among his effects led her to question that belief. This memoir is her attempt to examine their past and to discover who her husband really was. It is clear that she adored him, saw him as brilliant and talented and for a long time blamed herself for his failings. Because she is looking back at her husband and their long marriage with present-day eyes, it is not always clear what she knew and what she refused to know when she was younger and living through some truly trying, eye-opening experiences. Her conclusion is that her beloved, deeply troubled husband lived two lives: the domestic world with her, and the gay world that he tried desperately to keep secret.
The marriage candidly portrayed here, with all its joys and failures, misunderstandings and misery, provides ample fodder for discussion in women’s book groups.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65416-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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