Further adventures in smugness by the aloof major-domo, or household manager, who told about the riotous horrors of his life with Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue in That Girl and Phil (coauthored with Cherkinian, 1990). Atholl's favorite game as a child born into the English aristocracy was to lay out place settings for a great dinner, attend to decorations, and make everything party-perfect as if for royalty. His skill was famed, and in his teens he entered into domestic service in England—a career not looked down on there as it is in the States, and one that required encyclopedic knowledge of every department of housekeeping, from arranging linens and cutlery and flowers to handling the staff and choosing furniture and wallpaper. After running his own nightclub for two years, Atholl became a full-time major-domo to fabulously wealthy jet- setters and Arab princes and Wall Street zillionaires. One of his most recent jobs was as major-domo for Asher Edelman—the suggested model for Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko character in Wall Street— a man, Atholl says, with a $100-million art collection, a supremely expensive but nasty wife, and an equally costly Brazilian mistress. Atholl has usually quit the service of bachelors who marry, since he is seen as a rival intimate by the new wife. Prince Rashid, a Saudi, required Atholl to oversee the expenditures and management of a string of residences whose daily upkeep sat nicely beside the interest on the US national debt, and also to procure beautiful boys in every port. Readers aware of various famines will feel nauseated as Atholl describes how colossal egoists and parasites burned mountains of money to watch the flames. Aside from an apparent moral blindness about everything but good manners—a very droll read.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-08137-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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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