An immensely readable literary account of eccentric, memorable characters.
Having dealt with four generations of his famous family in Fathers and Sons (2007, etc.), Waugh delves into another quirky, brilliant, ill-starred clan.
The author is quite taken with the messy, convoluted genealogy of Vienna’s Wittgenstein family, enormously wealthy industrialists, philanthropists and artists. He focuses on the nine children of maverick entrepreneur Karl Wittgenstein, who in defiance of a difficult father forged a career as a wildly successful steel magnate. Waugh begins and ends with his evident favorite among the siblings: Paul, the artistic middle child, who lost an arm in World War I and nonetheless went on to become a famous pianist. All the siblings were marvelously musical, perhaps, Waugh speculates, as a means of communicating with their diffident mother. Three of Paul’s older brothers—Hans, Rudolf and Kurt—committed suicide, possibly as a result of their “sulphurous” relationship with their father, while youngest son Ludwig became a philosopher of cult status. Sister Hermine, the eldest, remained unmarried and tended the flame at the Wittgensteins’ Vienna homestead, writing a sanitized family memoir in her old age. Gretl married a rich American who succumbed to syphilitic psychosis and lost much of his fortune in the 1929 stock-market crash. Helene married a pillar of the Austrian Protestant establishment and had many children. In direct, thematic chapters, the author leads readers through family tragedies and crumbling of the old order, culminating in the Anschluss of 1938. Raised as Catholics and vaguely anti-Semitic, the now-middle-aged siblings were horrified to learn that three grandparents who had converted to Christianity cut no ice with the Nazis, who classified them all as “full Jews.” Led by well-connected Gretl, they collectively had to sign away much of their fortune in order to stay out of prison. Their opulent world, recaptured by Waugh in digestible, appealing biographical segments, was gone for good.
An immensely readable literary account of eccentric, memorable characters.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52060-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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