A love story of rare quality: intelligent, wise, and, above all, generous in spirit and understanding.
In a perfectly pitched and insightful account, physician David Gurewitsch’s widow lovingly recalls her husband’s abiding friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.
First and foremost this is a love story—not the usual romantic kind, but one celebrating a spiritual and intellectual affinity that impelled Roosevelt to write that she loved Gurewitsch “as I have never loved anyone else.” He was a Jewish doctor, 18 years her junior, born in Switzerland and raised by his grandparents in Russia while his widowed mother studied medicine. He became a doctor in Germany, then emigrated in 1936 to New York, where he practiced medicine and lived with his first wife. He first met Roosevelt while paying a house call on friends of hers, and when she moved to New York, he became her personal physician. Their deeper friendship began in 1949 on a delay-plagued flight to Switzerland. With time to talk, both found they had much in common, in particular lonely, fatherless childhoods and a determination to help those in need. Gurewitsch was soon accompanying Roosevelt on official visits to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and India and spending numerous weekends at her Hyde Park cottage. Quoting from their letters and his journals, Edna Gurewitsch describes those years before her own meeting with the now-divorced David. Roosevelt feared their marriage in 1958, but typically she soon included Edna in her life as well. In 1959, the three became co-owners of the Manhattan townhouse where Roosevelt lived until her death. The author recalls her meetings there with the great and famous, enriching the historical record with her acute observations. But her perceptive insights into Mrs. Roosevelt are the real gems here. She came to love and admire the former first lady as “one of the few people in this world in which greatness and modesty could coexist.”
A love story of rare quality: intelligent, wise, and, above all, generous in spirit and understanding.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28698-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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