An affectionate biography of a woman who in her late 30s finally saw the life she wanted and grabbed it.
The fascinating story of a member of Europe’s banking aristocracy who spent the second half of her life swinging with New York’s jazz aristocracy.
British filmmaker Hannah Rothschild’s print debut is based on a BBC documentary she made about her great-aunt Nica (1913–1988). The book is an engaging mixture of well-researched biography and personal reminiscences about her formidable relatives. A cogent account of the Rothschilds’ rise from Frankfurt’s bleak Jewish ghetto to the international capitals of finance makes palpable the world of privileged confinement Nica inhabited. Born into the English branch, Nica thought she could escape by marrying a glamorous French executive, but he proved as stuffy as her family. After giving birth to five children and narrowly escaping from France during the Nazi occupation, she was a restless diplomat’s wife on her way back to his posting in Mexico when she first heard the music of Thelonious Monk. “I never went home,” she later told her great-niece. She checked into New York’s Stanhope Hotel and was soon driving Monk and other then-unappreciated pioneers of the bebop revolution to gigs in her Rolls Royce. Hannah paints the attachment to Monk (who was married) as devoted friendship rather than an affair, though she also quotes scornful observers who viewed Nica as a rich groupie, an opinion reinforced in 1955 when Charlie Parker died of an overdose in her apartment. Hannah’s account of Nica’s relationships with these often troubled and drug-addicted musicians, which included taking the rap for Monk when Delaware police pulled them over in 1958 and found marijuana in her car, shows her to be a stalwart champion of their music and their civil rights. Hard-drinking, night-clubbing Nica comes across as an eccentric free spirit to equal the artists she idolized.
An affectionate biography of a woman who in her late 30s finally saw the life she wanted and grabbed it.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0307961983
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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