Shallow and nasty enough to make readers queasy. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)
Dogged diva biographer Heymann (Liz, 1995, etc.) purports to show that governments rose and fell by the promptings of those in DC’s glittery ghetto. From his report, however, the signal events were simply what Susan May told Missy and what Oatsie said about Rip and Adlai.
Five Georgetown duchesses—Katherine Graham, Lorraine Cooper, Evangeline Bruce, Pamela Harriman, and Sally Quinn—headline, supported by a large cast of featured players, including Liz Taylor, Warren Buffett, Ben Bradlee, and JFK. There’s Capote and his wretched Black and White caper for Kay Graham. Were these the best and brightest? Is this how Dolley Madison did it? Amid the clatter of teacups and tumblers of scotch, we hear the piercing clank of dropping names. It’s a toast to the sort who “liked pleasure and . . . had great fun with it.” Heymann informs us of loves, feuds, and peccadilloes. The tittle-tattle covers the fortunes, talents, connections, alliances, dalliances, table manners, looks, wardrobes, sleeping habits, and mental aberrations of yesteryear’s Georgetowners. CIA spooks, a mysterious murder, Joe Alsop’s sexual orientation, and Phil Graham’s madness all come up for discussion. Some of it is patently questionable. Did a hostess really revive Alan Greenspan with an oxygen tank she “happened to have on hand”? Did “everyone come dressed as a ground hog” to a Groundhog’s Day fête? It’s all cold dish, largely enclosed in quotation marks, an inflated and fetid hodgepodge suited to a tabloid’s party report. Admittedly, contrary to all decency, this sort of thing can become addictive and may even find a solid audience—but what’s the point?
Shallow and nasty enough to make readers queasy. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-2856-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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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