Fawning and trivial. How much is there to say about someone whose main claim to fame is that he wore the first modern, urban...
The insubstantial life of a turn-of-the-18th-century party boy and clotheshorse.
George Brummell (1778–1840) reigned briefly in London society before being hounded out of the country in 1816, plagued by debts and failing health. British biographer Kelly (Cooking for Kings, not reviewed) aims to celebrate Brummell’s lasting contribution to men’s fashion as the prototypical dandy (according to such contemporary observers as Byron and later admirers like Oscar Wilde). A commoner whose father made a fortune as Lord North’s private secretary, young Brummell grew up on Downing Street and was sent to Eton, where he mingled among the upper crust and made his mark with witty put-downs, a handsome figure and an understated elegance of dress. Indeed, by the time he came of age in 1799, Brummell was a favorite of the Prince of Wales. Blessed with a considerable inheritance, he could step out in style from his residence at 4 Chesterfield Street in Mayfair. He rode in Hyde Park, dined and gambled at White’s and Brook’s and attended the theater in the company of famous demimondaines Harriette Wilson and Julia Johnstone. “Beau,” as he became known, was mostly remarkable for his choice of tailoring. Tall and well-sculpted, he favored a deceptively simple, manly look, distinguished by exquisite attention to detail. Kelly quotes Max Beerbohm, who called Brummell “the Father of Modern Costume” and praised his style as “free from folly or affection, yet susceptible to exquisite ordering.” But in later years, his credit wore thin, his barbs no longer struck the Prince Regent’s funny bone and Brummell contracted syphilis, leading to unhappy retirement in Normandy, madness and death in an asylum.
Fawning and trivial. How much is there to say about someone whose main claim to fame is that he wore the first modern, urban suit?Pub Date: May 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7089-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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