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FANNY & ADELAIDE

Name: FANNY & ADELAIDE
Author: Ann Blainey
ISBN: 1-56663-372-9

THE LIVES OF THE REMARKABLE KEMBLE SISTERS

by Ann Blainey ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2001

Rich portraits of the sisters—and of the constraints and rewards of Victorian life. (b&w photos, not seen)

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Colorful adventures of two scions of a 19th-century English theatrical family.

Actress Fanny Kemble and her sister, Adelaide (a well-known opera singer), were the daughters of Charles Kemble, who helped launch London’s Covent Garden Theater. The legendary actress Sarah Siddons was their aunt. Although Fanny’s life has been much written about, her sister’s adventures are less famous. With Adelaide’s newly public letters as a basis, Blainey (Immortal Boy, not reviewed) has framed this story as a tale of two sisters whose lives were the stuff of the rousing melodramas popular during their lifetimes. Fanny, forced onto the stage to support her father’s failing enterprises, gave up the love of her life. She became a star in London and in America, where she again found love (or, at least, mighty sexual chemistry) with a Southern slave owner, Pierce Butler. Married and forced to abandon her career as a result, she turned her excess energy to the cause of abolition and wrote and spoke on the subject in America and England. Her determined independence—and her husband’s extramarital affairs—led to a divorce in which she was forced to give up her beloved daughters. What to do after this but return to the theater? And, in fact, Fanny rebuilt a successful career as actress and author, best known for her journal of life on a pre–Civil War plantation. Although more discreet than her sister, Adelaide’s adventures were no less notable. She, too, surrendered the love of her life to forge a singing career in England and on the Continent. After her marriage to the son of an Italian banker she shone as a hostess, and her musicales and at-homes drew famous authors, artists, and musicians (including Robert Browning, Henry James, Frederic Leighton, and Felix Mendelssohn). Fanny was challenging and abrasive, Adelaide serene and thoughtful, but both suffered mightily (as only Victorians could) at the necessity to choose between dutiful matrimony and exciting careers.

Rich portraits of the sisters—and of the constraints and rewards of Victorian life. (b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: June 8, 2001

ISBN: 1-56663-372-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

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)