Heartfelt and accomplished, but not a page-turner.
Landscape architect Gaston traces the life of her grandmother, a Jazz Age “It girl” gone wrong.
The author uncovers a family history long obscured by secrets and lies. Rosamond Pinchot was a New York socialite plucked from not-quite-obscurity by famed producer/director Max Reinhardt, who in 1923 discovered the tall, striking 19-year-old aboard a cruise ship and quickly established her as a Broadway star. She became a nationally known figure, appearing in advertisements and tracked by pundits. Gaston paints a dynamic portrait of her grandmother, making liberal use of Pinchot’s youthful diaries to reveal a privileged, conflicted girl chronically struggling with what she called “the Cinderella feeling,” a euphemism for the depression that would eventually lead to her suicide and subsequent near-disappearance from family lore. In lapidary though occasionally overheated prose, the author deftly juggles multiple chronologies and personal reminiscences to limn Pinchot and her bounder of a husband, “Big Bill” Gaston, their well-bred milieu and the various celebrities of the period that she knew. The effort and execution are admirable, but Pinchot was not a significant artist, or even, based on the evidence here, a particularly interesting person; it’s questionable whether general readers will much care about this story. It functions well as a window into a largely vanished social and cultural structure, but readers may have the nagging feeling of sitting through a protracted examination of a stranger’s family album.
Heartfelt and accomplished, but not a page-turner.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-085770-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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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