A veritable storm of outtakes from Leonard Lyons’ “Lyons Den” society column from the New York Post, which dazzle rather than titillate.
Lyons wrote his column for exactly 40 years, from 1934 to 1974—six columns a week, tallying 12,479 at 1,000 words each—about people in the public eye. He would leave for work as the sun went down, heading for a variety of hot spots—Toots Shor’s, Downey’s, Sardi’s, El Morocco, the Stork Club, the Little Club, or all of them—gathering choice items for his readership. “Leonard Lyons genuinely admired the people he wrote about,” writes Charles Osgood in the foreword. “And knowing this they would open up to him and tell him the colorful stories that were his bread and butter.” Here, his son, TV and movie critic Jeffrey Lyons, sews together pieces from his father’s columns into vest-pocket profiles of the famous, from Irving Berlin to Shelly Winters. For those who have never dined on Lyons’ work, this collection is a treat: Lyons was a champion at getting telling quotes, material as pithy and vivid as the Algonquin Round Table—e.g., Lauren Bacall’s response to whether she would curtsy to Prince Philip: “If he curtsies to me, I’ll curtsy to him. In this world, you get what you give.” Or Joe DiMaggio: “Never wake a ballplayer on a rainy morning.” There are terrific comments from a stunning range of characters—Einstein, Rocky Marciano, Groucho Marx, Chagall—and if Lyons can seem a bit eager and star-struck (“There was never anyone like Oscar Levant”; “Orson Welles…the most amazing person you’d ever meet”), he takes such obvious pleasure in the telling that readers will be swept along with him. An intoxicating selection of snippets from a columnist that journalist Pete Hamill called “an ornament to the profession.”
Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7892-1102-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Abbeville Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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