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JOY ADAMSON

BEHIND THE MASK

Kenyan writer Cass rips the mask off Joy Adamson of Born Free fame to reveal a woman of monstrous flaws, considerable talents, and a redeeming generosity. The second daughter of an ill-matched Austrian couple who soon divorced, Adamson was raised in Vienna by a beloved grandmother. There, in the years between the wars, she studied music, then flitted ``from one new artistic endeavor to another.'' Stunningly beautiful, she had a number of affairs, the most serious of which led to an illegal abortion that nearly killed her. Her Jewish first husband, worried about the Nazis, sent her to East Africa in 1936 to scout out the possibility of settling there. It was a fateful trip, for during it Adamson not only met the botanist who would be her second husband but became enthralled by Africa itself. Divorcing her first husband, she settled in Kenya, married the botanist, and accompanied him throughout the country collecting rare plants. Adamson, though difficult and demanding, proved herself a real trooper in the wild, and her paintings of plant specimens earned her a considerable reputation as an artist. But congenitally restless in bed and elsewhere, she soon was having further affairs, a 1942 visit to the remote camp of naturalist George Adamson leading to her third marriage. Cass, who knew Joy, describes the raising of Elsa the lion cub; the writing of Born Free; the realities of the Adamsons' marriage—more a bruising brawl than a love-fest; Joy's murder, probably by a servant she'd typically mistreated; her great generosity to conservation; and Joy herself, who, despite all her faults, ``remained passionately in love with life—a firm believer that, through animals, man would discover his soul.'' Cass, gossipy but fair-minded, shows Adamson to have been as ruthless and predatory as her beloved lions but also—sometimes—as splendid. (Color and b&w illustrations)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-297-81141-X

Page Count: 236

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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