Famous names and juicy stories, served up with literary elegance.
Distinguished journalist, novelist and biographer du Plessix Gray (Simone Weil, 2001, etc.) turns her descriptive and analytic powers to the legendary lives of her glamorous, Russian-born mother and stepfather.
Only child Francine was often sidelined growing up in the towering, narcissistic presence of the former Tatiana Iakovleva of St. Petersburg, who later gained fame as Saks Fifth Avenue’s hat designer, and Tatiana’s debonair second husband, Alexander Liberman, who rose through the editorial ranks at Condé Nast to become second in command to owner Si Newhouse. Du Plessix Gray writes about her parents with wary diffidence, fulfilling with reluctance her filial duty as biographer while making lively work of it. Most fascinating are the stories of old-world ancestors, aristocratic artists, and intellectuals like Tatiana’s father, an engineer who designed theaters for the czar; and her uncle Sasha, dashing explorer, linguist and celebrated artist who brought his niece out of revolutionary Russia to modernist Paris. There, teenager Tatiana apprenticed with a hat-maker while attracting notable suitors such as poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Ever the opportunist, Tatiana made a better match with aristocratic French diplomat Bertrand du Plessix, though they were estranged after Tatiana ruined his career prospects with social faux pas in Warsaw. Bertrand went missing in action while working for the Free French, allowing Tatiana and her lover Liberman, a Russian-Jewish artist schooled in England, to head for New York with young Francine in tow to start a new life. Expanded from a New Yorker article, du Plessix Gray’s generous, astute study paints two compelling, Machiavellian personalities. Tatiana and Alex, stars of the émigré community, ascended the New York social ladder by dint of sheer personality and hard work, astutely using and dropping friends as they went. They gave little thought to the psychic health of their pampered young charge, who responds as an adult by running hot and cold by turns while depicting their glamorous, casually destructive life together.
Famous names and juicy stories, served up with literary elegance.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-049-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
