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ALI IN WONDERLAND

AND OTHER TALL TALES

A smart, often-funny memoir.

Comedienne Wentworth revisits her privileged and precocious early years.

In this satirical dissection of class and privilege, the author, daughter of President Ronald Reagan’s social secretary Muffie Cabot, mines a childhood spent among America’s elite. By the time she landed a role on the sketch show In Living Color, Wentworth had already put on vaudevillian after-dinner performances for Henry Kissinger. As a socialite in training, she keyed into a number of important life lessons—e.g., “There’s a fine line between WASP victuals and white-trash cuisine.” Wentworth’s glib take on America’s social hierarchy might initially seem like a blue blood’s guide to slumming it, but her savvy understanding of what she’s been given versus what she’s earned makes for a sharp critique of class and power. She probes her marriage to former political operative and current TV newsman George Stephanopoulos for insights about pregnancy, child-rearing and compromise. Her understated prose and deadpan humor go a long way toward making this account of life among the one-percenters easy to swallow. If readers aren’t taken with her charm, they’d be well advised to follow her mother’s catch-all advice: “Just go to the Four Seasons.” Nothing’s better than blocking out the world behind silk curtains, sinking into crisp linen sheets and ringing for tea and crumpets. Wentworth would likely suggest the same remedy to readers who aren’t immediately enamored with her collection of vignettes. She’d be winking slyly as she did, though.

A smart, often-funny memoir.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-06-199857-7

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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