A generous but ultimately critical assessment of lives conducted with style, if little substance.
English journalist and short-story writer Connolly (The Happiest Days, 2000) relates the bohemian adventures of the fabulously unconventional, beautiful, Garman siblings.
Nine children were born in the first decade of the 20th century to a prosperous country doctor and his cultured wife in England’s West Midlands, called the “Black Country” because of its numerous iron and coal mines. The subtitle notwithstanding, a boy joins three of his sisters to serve as main protagonists in Connolly’s serpentine and occasionally elliptical biography. Eldest daughter Mary, a painter, and gifted pianist Kathleen ran away to London and made a splash with the Café Royal crowd, living on the edges of Bloomsbury and attracting many admirers despite their lack of formal education. Mary wed the noted South African poet Roy Campbell and moved restlessly around Europe, enjoying affairs with Vita Sackville-West, among others. Kathleen’s lifelong liaison with sculptor Jacob Epstein led to four children, a rarefied network of artist friends, and eventual marriage. Meanwhile, handsome, bookish Douglas quit Cambridge to become a journalist and devoted communist, scrounging work at important new magazines such as Calendar of Modern Letters and Left Review, marrying twice and having a long affair with Peggy Guggenheim in between. Moreover, Douglas worked closely with publisher Ernest Wishart, who married the youngest Garman sister, 16-year-old Lorna. She was the most glamorous manslayer of them all, numbering poet Laurie Lee and painter Lucian Freud among her conquests. Heady lists of names, dates, titles of works, and neglected offspring flit through these pages; the reader needs a solid background in modernism to fill in between the lines, because the author does not provide historical context. Connolly is clearly smitten by the sisters’ glamour, yet horrified by their nonchalant childrearing, and in the end she can’t conceal a creeping impatience for their subservience to their lovers’ talents, despite their own artistic gifts.
A generous but ultimately critical assessment of lives conducted with style, if little substance.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621247-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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