Keenan understands how much the world has changed and hopes her story will resonate with reflective readers who will...
A memoir about “what it was like to grow up…in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s in a family that was, like Britain itself, facing and adapting to the enormous changes taking place around us with gathering speed.” Keenan (Packing Up: Further Adventures of a Trailing Spouse, 2014, etc.), who lived in India until she was 8, recounts her childhood in India followed by her career as a fashion reporter in London during the 1960s. The author’s gossipy, lighthearted narrative offers a peek into the lives of a certain slice of British society. As a member of the British military, the author’s father was posted to India. Born in 1939, Keenan was a member of the generation known as “the last of the British Raj babies.” Keenan interweaves her memories of her family life on a British army base with the rich cultural, social, and political life of India. In 1947, following Indian independence from the 200-year British rule and the division of India into two countries, the family returned to Britain. Returning home to a “grim postwar England after a Technicolor childhood in one of England’s colonies” as a teenager was a challenge. However, the author became one of the it girls of her day and was cited as “one of the two best young fashion writers of the day.” While many of the pop cultural references and personalities Keenan mentions may be unfamiliar to American readers, the author skillfully captures the zeitgeist of the youth rebellion in London during the 1960s. Her world did include a solid cast of well-known characters, including Nora Ephron, Jean Shrimpton, Terence Conran, Mary Quant, Diana Vreeland, and Vidal Sassoon.
Keenan understands how much the world has changed and hopes her story will resonate with reflective readers who will appreciate her brief but warm glance back in time.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4088-5227-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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