A romping, vivacious memoir covering eight decades of one woman’s peripatetic existence that reads as though Katherine Hepburn was dropped into one of Hunter S. Thompson’s fever dreams.
From the moment Lloyd thwarts her father’s plans to send her to a staid, prim private school for young ladies, the author twists, turns and swivels through marriages, children and countless parties, alongside battles with alcoholism, illness and disappointment. Married early to an eccentric heir to the Standard Drug Company, Lloyd quickly learns that the she’s made a ill-advised decision and encroaches on what promises to be a very public divorce, the process abruptly cut short when she learns her soon-to-be ex-husband has been killed in a car accident and an inheritance of $1 million has landed at her feet. Lloyd promptly enters into her second marriage and bankrolls her new husband’s many failing businesses until they discover Spanish Wells, an island in the Bahamas where the couple opens a scuba resort they successfully helm for 15 years—until tragedy strikes again. It’s at this turn that Lloyd embarks on perhaps the most challenging part of her life as she faces down illness, her long-standing alcoholism and the volatility of love. The author’s tone is infectious, if occasionally too digressive, but her tale zigs and zags through so many decadent experiences—travel, luxury and plenty of camp—that the reader can’t help but be carried along with the swell. The story crisply refuses to draw a conclusion about the ranging life its protagonist has led, leaving us to revel in the sooty side of bad decisions and the punchy highs brought on by hard-won redemption. A survivor’s story that sometimes buckles under its loquacious tendencies yet reveals a one-of-a-kind life bound together by abandon, resilience and pure fun.
Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-1929882571
Page Count: 361
Publisher: Biographical
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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