Suspiciously like a Brearley essay: Organized, researched, opinionated—with nothing below the neck. (Author tour)
Life since private school: neither a useful sociological study nor an intimate memoir.
Fishel (Family Mirrors, 1991) was one of 25 young women who graduated from New York City’s elite Brearley School in 1968, a year of widespread antiwar and anti-authority demonstrations, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and violent clashes between protesters and police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. How did the Brearley group, emerging from an intellectually rigorous but socially insulated environment, fare as they moved into a world where traditional values were indeed being upended? Fishel chooses to follow ten of the women in detail, from their years in Brearley to the present. They coped or struggled in four distinct styles, discussed in chapters on the untraditional traditionalist, the unconventional career-tracker, the seeker, and the juggler. In essence, however, they were a rather boringly homogenous group, white, upwardly mobile, and upper middle class. All came from a background where "nice and not nice" were carefully defined, and any deviation from the rules was a closely guarded secret. Keeping the rules or keeping the secrets drove some of the women to suicide; more often the clash of cultures—virginity, white wine, and dancing school versus sex, drugs, and rock and roll, even at Vassar and Wellesley—set others adrift. "They often let choices choose them," says Fishel astutely. But what threw them sounds like no more than what throws most high school graduates set loose in a wider world: separation from family, search for identity, anxiety over newfound freedom. The Brearley girls stumbled to adulthood with the usual number of divorces, wrong career choices, and children, and perhaps a tad more social commitment and soul-searching than the average American. At the class’s 30th reunion, Fishel found them relatively content, but still searching for balance among love, work, and family.
Suspiciously like a Brearley essay: Organized, researched, opinionated—with nothing below the neck. (Author tour)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-44983-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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