The story of the glittering trio who exemplified glamour (and shrewd matchmaking) to a captivated public gets a curiously lifeless treatment from biographer Grafton (Red, Hot, and Rich, 1987). Daughters of renowned brain-surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing, Mary (``Minnie''), Betsey, and Barbara (``Babe''), apt pupils of a strong-willed mother for whom ``marriage was a business,'' lived a saga that would put most romance novelists to shame. Betsey, favorite daughter-in-law of FDR while wife of his son James, traded up to equally well-bred (and much wealthier) John Hay ``Jock'' Whitney. Babe went from socialite Stanley Mortimer, Jr., to CBS founder William S. Paley, a demanding philanderer but rich enough to secure her position as the ``ultimate fashion and social icon of New York's dazzling scene.'' Minnie endured a miserable union with sullen multimillionaire Vincent Astor before establishing a lively artistic salon with a second husband—the impeccably patrician (and openly homosexual) painter James Fosburgh. Only Betsey managed to find marital happiness along with wealth, but none of the sisters blamed adored mother Gogsie. Featuring an unusually varied cast of society, political, and artistic figures—from the British royal family to Truman Capote—what could have been a fun, frothy gossip- fest is instead a leaden recitation of guest lists, jewelry details, and clothing descriptions. Not that Grafton doesn't drop a juicy tidbit or two—the stylish Babe had all her teeth knocked out in a teenage auto accident; Eleanor Roosevelt didn't shave her underarms—but he hedges a lot: the Astors' marriage may not have been consummated, but, then again, Minnie may have been a lesbian; on the other hand, she was Vincent's mistress for years before the wedding. Subjects who deserve at least style, if not substance, get neither in this superficial chronicle. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58416-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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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