Fascinating mother-daughter symbiosis makes this a Freudian feast.
New York journalist Nathan rescues from oblivion the enigmatic author of a beloved, politically incorrect children's book.
Dare Wright died at age 86 in a state nursing home on Roosevelt Island.That was in 2001—44 years after the publication of The Lonely Doll launched her popular (and exceedingly weird) children’s book series. Born in Canada, Wright was brought up mostly in Cleveland, where her divorced mother Edie tenaciously made a living as a portrait painter. Dare enjoyed a fairly glamorous adult life in Manhattan in the ’50s and ’60s, first as a photographer, fashion model, and actress, then as the author of numerous Edith and the Bears books. Yet the story Nathan doggedly pursues is of the steely umbilical bond between artistically driven, egotistical mother and beautiful, submissive, obedient daughter. Edie and Dare did everything together: they traveled as a pair, collaborated in work, fended off importunate admirers, even slept in the same bed. Their parents’ 1919 divorce traumatized both four-year-old Dare and her seven-year-old brother Blaine, who was sent away to live with his alcoholic father. Only in their late 20s did the siblings finally reunite, spending long vacations together in upstate New York and negotiating prickly truces between son and mother, who vied for Dare’s attention. This sad, triangular drama was enacted for the rest of their lives, as none of the Wrights seemed to need intimacy outside the threesome. Dare’s fetish for her doll, Edith—funny how similar that name is to Mom’s—led her to develop, with Edie’s help, a story in photographs (complete with spanking scenes), which she painstakingly composed like a fashion shoot. Legions of fans cherished The Lonely Doll and subsequent books, though their affection couldn’t ease Dare’s bitter old age, soaked in alcohol following Edie’s and Blaine’s deaths. Nathan’s straightforward account somewhat dryly sticks to the facts, allowing the curious and very lovely photographs that Dare and her mother took of each other over a lifetime to tell much of the story.
Fascinating mother-daughter symbiosis makes this a Freudian feast.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7612-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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