Transcending the usual lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous sensationalism, Stasz (American Dreamers, 1988, etc.) here creates a captivating and thoughtful blend of social history and family chronicle. Blessed with unassailable pedigree and unimaginable wealth, the Vanderbilt women, argues Stasz, present a tantalizing illustration of ``the unfolding of female rebellion from one generation to the next.'' Allotting space and considerable understanding to the expected social matrons and neglected wives (and not slighting abundant and well-known scandals), the author takes particular delight in the many Vanderbilt renegades. Chief among them is the extraordinary Alva Smith, who turned her considerable energies from the task of conquering society (finding a suitably rich husband in sportsman William K. Vanderbilt; breaking the ``old money'' barriers maintained by the formidable Mrs. Astor—of ``400'' fame—with her spectacular social extravaganzas) to that of shocking it. Divorcing the philandering ``Willie,'' she married sympathetic aesthete (and millionaire) Harry Belmont, and, as the widowed Mrs. Belmont, became a startlingly progressive and hard-working leader of the women's movement (advocating not just suffrage, but equal rights). A quieter rebel, her niece Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the other star of Stasz's study, became a notable sculptor and patron of the arts, supporting and championing the American artists who clustered around her Greenwich Village studio, and later founding the Whitney Museum. Unfortunately, as Stasz ably points out, the very real accomplishments of these women (and of Gertrude's famous niece Gloria, sympathetically portrayed here as far more than an earnest dilettante) were often belittled (not least by themselves) due to their immense wealth. Their most striking characteristic, the author notes, is that, consigned to a ``women's sphere'' that isolated them from the power reserved for male descendants, they used their freedom and resources to carve stubbornly individual existences. A deft, delightful, and compulsively readable mixture of gossip and feminist history. (Twenty-four pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-06486-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
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
SEEN & HEARD
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