Bittersweet window into a privileged yet insecure upbringing.
FDR’s eldest grandson nostalgically recounts his childhood growing up in close proximity to his charismatic grandparents.
The author’s mother Anna, FDR’s only daughter, was in the midst of a divorce in 1933 when she moved with three-year-old Curtis and his elder sister into the White House. The siblings instantly became darlings of the press as “Sistie and Buzzie.” Roosevelt captures the delight of living at the White House from the perspective of a child given access to presidential marches, receptions and afternoon teas. But it was also a lonely time: He had a hands-off upbringing ruled by strict routine and spent more time with his nannies than with his mother. He contrasts her approach with that of his great-grandmother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, whose “love was unreserved” during summer vacations at her 1,500-acre Hudson Valley estate. Like the rest of his family, the author was in awe of FDR, whose presence generated “a kind of electricity in the air” and who “was, and remains, my father image.” The drama intensified when eight-year-old Curtis was forced to leave the White House to follow his mother and stepfather to multiple residences in New York and Seattle. He pined for the importance and prestige he felt in the rarefied White House atmosphere, finding respite only when visiting for Christmas celebrations. The author cryptically links his growing apathy and lack of ambition as a teenager to his overbearingly famous family lineage, hypothesizing that he was “suffering from growing up in the orbits of my grandfather and grandmother.” The memoir reveals, however, that Anna, a peremptory and distant mother focused on her famous parents and her love life, was more directly responsible. She sought career opportunities for herself through FDR, eventually undercutting her own mother’s role as his confidant, but denied her son such opportunities as the family’s traditional private schooling. In fact, the author never got as close to FDR’s sun as his mother did, though he longed for it.
Bittersweet window into a privileged yet insecure upbringing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58648-554-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
