An exemplary biography of a not-always-exemplary subject. Sure to be the standard work on Wharton for years to come.
Absorbing life of the expatriate novelist and socialite whose work, though not widely read today, underlies film after film.
She was hailed as both a “citizen of the world” and “the last Victorian writer” when she died 70 years ago. Edith Wharton was indeed an accomplished traveler who transcended idle moneyed tourism to endure a few discomforts in search of an interesting story. Still, as Lee (Virginia Woolf, 1997, etc.) tells us, Wharton came up in wealth and enjoyed every ounce of accumulated privilege, which included the wherewithal to build splendid neo-palaces and restore real ones—and manors and farmhouses and gardens. She lived abroad in post–Gilded Age luxury thanks to the inheritance of three fortunes and, for at least part of her life, a solid income as a writer. Wharton, Lee allows, had the prejudices of her age and class; on her deathbed, she “talked about her love of Balzac, her strong feelings for the Catholic Church and her dislike of Jews.” Yet she was a pioneer who took the circumstances of her own life, such as her unhappy marriage to a depressive alcoholic, and turned them into romans à clef such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. The Wharton who emerges as a vigorous and visible presence in these pages loved life, was at home in many languages and places and was free of other kinds of prejudices; she may be one of the earliest American writers to have used the word “gay” in its modern connotation. She was also a brilliant writer, recognized as such in her time, mentioned in the same breath as Henry James, with whom she had a long relationship—and who is now mentioned less than she, at least “as an indicator for certain subjects: wealth, social status, old New York.”
An exemplary biography of a not-always-exemplary subject. Sure to be the standard work on Wharton for years to come.Pub Date: April 30, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-40004-4
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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
SEEN & HEARD
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