One-dimensional characters undermine the potential drama of life within a castle.
The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Vanderbilts.
At the end of the 19th century, the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, was the biggest, grandest, most opulent home in America. Set on 125,000 acres, the 175,000-square-foot mansion contained 250 rooms, 43 bathrooms, 3 kitchens, 65 fireplaces, and a 72-foot-long banquet hall. Eight million bricks cloaked its 750-foot facade, and a massive dining table could seat more than 70 guests. Filled with art and sculpture, the house was the pride and obsession of George Washington Vanderbilt II (1862-1914), grandson of the shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. Biltmore House is the setting for Kiernan’s (The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, 2013, etc.) family history, featuring George and his wife, Edith Dresser. Unfortunately, the house itself emerges as a livelier presence than its inhabitants. George was a mystery even to his best friend, who called him “cold-blooded,” moody, and reticent. He enjoyed napping and reading. “You know I do not for a moment envy the position of GV,” his friend noted. “He is not one speck as happy as I am, and the spending of money gives him absolutely no thrill.” He seemed not interested in women, either, but at the age of 35, “America’s richest bachelor” became engaged to Edith, the well-bred, though not wealthy, daughter of a noted New York family whose ancestors included Manhattan governor Peter Stuyvesant. Kiernan discloses little about their personalities and nothing about their courtship or relationship as husband and wife. She does chronicle their wedding, honeymoon, return to Asheville, and many other travels as well as the declining fortunes that made Biltmore an exceedingly expensive undertaking. Edith engaged in much charity work before and after George’s sudden death. The couple had one child, but the author hardly looks at her relationship with her parents, focusing mostly on the family’s financial woes, which became increasingly dire.
One-dimensional characters undermine the potential drama of life within a castle.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9404-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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