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LOVE IN THE TEMPEST OF HISTORY

Name: LOVE IN THE TEMPEST OF HISTORY
Author: Aude Yung-de Prévaux
ISBN: 0-7432-0194-9

A FRENCH RESISTANCE STORY

by Aude Yung-de Prévaux & translated by Barbara Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2001

A moving story of characters, arresting to begin with, who rise to acts of extreme courage.

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The romantic history of French journalist Yung-de Prévaux’s parents—both of whom died in the French Resistance and about whom Yung-de Prévaux knew nothing until she was 24—written with captivating directness, passion, and formality.

Yung-de Prévaux was a student in Paris in 1966 when she learned by chance that her real parents were Jacques and Lotka de Prévaux. Here, she pulls together what pieces of their lives she can, a task made all the more difficult as her father’s profoundly religious family had disowned him when he divorced his wife to marry Lotka, a Jewish woman from Poland whose family died in the camps. But her picture is fairly complete and sparklingly written. Jacques was an airship pilot and a naval officer in the French navy—an admiral, at that—a womanizer equally content in his youth to be playing Chopin on the piano or reclining in an opium den when he was stationed in the Far East. Yung-de Prévaux cuts her father a good deal of slack (of his wandering ways during his first marriage: “Jacques led an extensive and complicated love life, not through libertinage but from the need to exercise his powers of seduction”), but he emerges as a flawed if alluring character deeply involved in what was a remarkable moment in history. Lotka made her way to Paris from southern Poland, became a fashion model, and moved with a fast, artistic crowd. They met, sparks flew, he divorced, his family withdrew, and they married. Shortly thereafter, war broke out in France, and the Prévauxs joined the F2 branch of the Resistance, operating in the south of the country: she as a courier and he in intelligence. They were captured late in the war, tortured but revealed nothing, and shot days before the liberation of Lyon.

A moving story of characters, arresting to begin with, who rise to acts of extreme courage.

Pub Date: April 10, 2001

ISBN: 0-7432-0194-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001

Categories:

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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

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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)