No doubt Mary Frances Kennedy (known as MFK) Fisher, now 82, is as vibrant, witty, and elegantly sensual a writer and person as her countless admirers delight in reporting. No doubt the world is richer for the recent reprinting of her old books and maybe even for the appearance of her newer ones. But do we now need whole books from others just attesting to her charms? ``It's hard to write about writers who write about themselves because they've already set down everything they want you to know,'' Ferrary (coauthor, Season to Taste, 1988, etc.) acknowledges here. Her solution is to eschew straight biography for appreciative memoir: She appreciates Fisher's ``high sense of life, her wired sensitivity...her radiating wit and style...her intensity,'' and much more of the same. And in prose that is often graceful and amusing if sometimes sticky-cute, she remembers 12 years of congenial visits and ``chatting-up times,'' with Ferrary agonizing over what gift of food to take this paragon of gastronomy and Fisher always coming through with just the right lunch dish and sparkling presence. Though Ferrary traveled f rom California to Radcliffe to study Fisher's papers in the Schlesinger Library, she is too good a friend to probe into her subject's private or inner life. The three husbands are barely identified and, of Fisher's lifelong devotion to her father, whom she called by his first name Rex, Ferrary says coyly, ``But I am a friend...I do not talk about Oedipus and Rex in the same sentence, as if I'm so smart.'' Instead, ``when I am with her we are laughing, we are wondering, we are twirling around.'' Privileged glimpses, then, for fellow worshippers.
Pub Date: May 29, 1991
ISBN: 0-87113-450-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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