Unlike numerous other biographers, Hirshey never falls into the trap of reductionism. Although Brown sometimes presents...
Journalist Hirshey (We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock, 2001, etc.) presents a deeply researched biography of daring author and hugely influential magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown (1922-2012).
Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and her decadeslong editorship of a seemingly moribund Cosmopolitan magazine starting in 1965 seem easy to dismiss in an era of pervasive feminism beginning around 1970. However, Hirshey convincingly shows how Brown demonstrated some feminist tendencies and was certainly no shallow airhead (a term that fits with some of the informal prose peppered throughout the book). Before the author narrates Brown's unlikely ascension to influence and fame in New York City, she relates remarkable, telling details about her subject's childhood and young adulthood in rural Arkansas and then Los Angeles. After Brown's father died when Helen was 10 years old, her mother, Cleo, became unmoored geographically and unhinged emotionally. As a result, Helen and her older sister had to survive an unstable and sometimes poverty-stricken stretch. “Much of what Helen understood about her people was colored by her mother’s melancholy worldview,” writes Hirshey. In Helen's case, the agony was magnified by an inherent shyness and a terrible extended period of acne, which she believed rendered her physically unattractive. Although she outgrew the acne, she never felt that she was "pretty enough." Nonetheless, through sheer will, Brown succeeded in the advertising world, charted an ambitious social life that included open pursuit of premarital sex, and married late and well. Hirshey vividly relates how her husband, David Brown, parlayed his experience in both publishing and cinema into helping Helen conceive her bestselling books and turn around Cosmopolitan.
Unlike numerous other biographers, Hirshey never falls into the trap of reductionism. Although Brown sometimes presents contradictions that cannot be easily resolved, the author portrays the complexities with skill.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-16917-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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