Some intriguing historical tidbits, delivered with gushing language and a gossipy tone.
Freewheeling biography of a racy Georgian demimondaine.
Manning (Seducing Mr. Heywood, etc., not reviewed) was inspired to delve more deeply into the life of divorcée Grace Elliott (1754–1823) after seeing Eric Rohmer’s film The Lady and the Duke, based on the Englishwoman’s posthumously published memoir of surviving the Reign of Terror in Paris. Well, perhaps “delve” is not quite the verb that springs to mind when the result is a text notable for its breathless prose and fawning treatment of British aristocracy. Born Grace Dalrymple in Edinburgh, Elliott was educated in a continental boarding school and married off at age 17 to an odious social-climbing doctor half her height and twice her age. She cuckolded John Eliot fairly quickly, thanks to her alluring beauty and the attentions of debauched gallant Lord Valentia. And she made an equally swift passage from shunned divorcé to fashionable lady (subject of several remarkable Gainsborough portraits) in both London and Paris. Lord Cholmondeley was her patron for several years, followed by Philippe, duc d’Orléans, the richest man in France, and then the Prince of Wales. Prinny, as the future George IV was known, may or may not have sired Elliott’s daughter Georgiana, but he ensured the girl’s care for the rest of her life. The intrepid Englishwoman’s finest hour occurred during the French Revolution. Openly loyalist, she probably smuggled letters for Marie-Antoinette. She was imprisoned and nearly guillotined for consorting with the turncoat Orléans. Manning exuberantly accompanies her account of these personages and their high-jinks with numerous, gleeful sidebars about topics such as birth control methods, scandal-mongering newspapers, the ascension of Madame Guillotine and the pronunciation of British upper-class names. My Lady will appeal to amateur historians and loyal followers of the current Prince Charles, to whom the author refers frequently.
Some intriguing historical tidbits, delivered with gushing language and a gossipy tone.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6262-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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