Refreshingly, the author rarely complains or brags, creating an honest portrait of a privileged upbringing.
A memoir from the granddaughter of the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Biddle (The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made: A Family Memoir, 2017), who served as the president of the Whitney from 1977 to 1995, writes about how her grandmother Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875-1942) founded the Whitney and how her descendants, including the author, continue to serve on its board. As Biddle shows, in families of wealth, it was accepted that children were turned over to nannies, governesses, and servants while parents were often absent in body and mind. The formality her parents exhibited toward her and her siblings left her seeking more meaningful human contact, which she found in a kind nursery attendant, a teacher, and her riding instructor, among others. She never smiled in childhood photos, was frightened to disobey, and was under constant supervision. Though she had security and comfort, the author was taught to mask feelings of sadness, boredom, and the constant loneliness she mentions throughout the book. “School” was just a few children on the grounds of Joye Cottage in Aiken, South Carolina, where most of her childhood was spent. “It was my first nest,” she writes, “and the one that means the most to me in a long life; a touchstone, origin and symbol of that part of me that is deep inside.” Biddle writes fondly of days spent fishing and hunting, activities that she was occasionally able to enjoy with her parents. When summering in France, the family spoke only French, receiving a fine if they spoke English. Dotted throughout the narrative are intriguing tidbits about life among the ultrawealthy—e.g., the artist who painted her portrait in 1938 “would later be painting President Roosevelt at the time he died.”
Refreshingly, the author rarely complains or brags, creating an honest portrait of a privileged upbringing.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948924-00-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
SEEN & HEARD
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