Adds to the literature on the Roosevelts and Whitneys, but the father-son relationship holds more interest than the romance.
This dual biography recounts the lives and doomed courtship of Quentin Roosevelt, youngest son of Theodore, and Flora Payne Whitney.
Biographer Bishop (The Lion and the Journalist: The Unlikely Friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Bucklin Bishop, 2011) examines letters, cablegrams, diaries and other sources—some still unpublished—to tell how these two scions of influential American families grew up, met and fell in love. Quentin (1897-1918) was the irrepressible youngest child in the large Roosevelt household. Energetic and curious, he had a deep interest in engines and machines (especially aeroplanes) and loved fiction and poetry. Flora (1897-1986), daughter of one of the wealthiest families in America, was raised largely by governesses among luxury and privilege. Bishop traces their relationship “from awkward adolescent acquaintanceship to impassioned love” through their engagement and Quentin’s death in an aerial battle. Well-written and novelistic, the book also brings to light unpublished material, helping augment the stories of two prominent American families. But Bishop’s emphasis on a year and a half of “exemplary love…authentic and full-bodied” between two 20-year-olds has a weak foundation. Reading their letters, there is little to distinguish their relationship from that of any other young couple separated by war, missing each other and fearing for the future. “I love you, dearest, and always shall” is something any lonely airman might write. More fruitful are Bishop’s speculations about how damaging Theodore Roosevelt’s high expectations for his sons were when combined with “a distorted, romanticized view of war.” (An interesting comparison here might have been made to Kipling and his son.) Sometimes, though, Bishop seems to romanticize war himself; he quotes—with no sense of irony or history—the tag “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (it is sweet and right to die for your country) after describing the Great War memorial tablet at Quentin’s school.
Adds to the literature on the Roosevelts and Whitneys, but the father-son relationship holds more interest than the romance.Pub Date: April 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495253836
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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