by Anne Sebba ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 13, 2012
Salacious and consuming, this well-researched biography will appeal to readers interested in British political and women's...
An in-depth biography of the notorious Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, the American divorcée whose marriage to King Edward VIII cost him the throne.
Already a bestseller in the UK, the latest work by biographer Sebba (American Jennie: The Remarkable Life of Lady Randolph Churchill, 2007, etc.) pulls no punches in revealing the secrets of its subject. Born in 1896 in Pennsylvania, Bessie Wallis Warfield was raised by a single mother dependent on the charity of her less-than-generous family. Even by virtue of shortening her name, Sebba theorizes, Wallis proved herself to be self-created and controlling. Though funny and smart, she was neither brilliant nor beautiful. Much of the book focuses on her romantic and sexual life, including a claim that Wallis most likely suffered from a disorder of sexual development, or intersexuality. It's impossible to know definitively, but Sebba's extensive research has led her to conclude that Wallis may have been born genetically male, but developed outwardly as a female, or, alternatively, that she was a pseudo-hermaphrodite. Wallis herself claimed never to have had intercourse with either of her first two husbands. She was still married when she met Edward, whose obsession with marrying Wallis prompted outrage across England and led him to abdicate his throne. She was granted a second divorce, and the two married in 1937 after two years of waiting. Derisively referred to as "that woman" by the Queen Mother, Wallis is depicted, in grand detail, as cunning yet "irresistible" for her charismatic "personal sparkle."
Salacious and consuming, this well-researched biography will appeal to readers interested in British political and women's history.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00296-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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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...
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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