For American readers, a peek at British life upstairs as it really was.
A gossipy take on the glossy but star-crossed lives of two well-connected women who inspired writers and painters but were often lonely and unfulfilled.
Like a Merchant-Ivory movie, the story told by British food-writer Dimbleby takes place in a luxurious country house (Kiddington Hall in Oxfordshire) whose guests included royalty (the Prince of Wales), politicians (Herbert Asquith), famous writers (Henry James), and artists (Edward Burne-Jones), all making and breaking romantic attachments. It makes for an entertaining if speculative read, as the author tries to understand her great-grandmother May and great-aunt Amy. In 1873, May, the daughter of a clergyman noted for her beauty and charm, married Henry Gaskell, a wealthy former soldier. She bore him three children (Amy was the eldest), but his reclusive habits, long silences, and morose personality soon irreparably strained the marriage. May began to spend more time away from him, both abroad and in London, where she became a popular member of influential social and cultural circles. In 1892, she met pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and became the last romantic obsession of his life. It appears that the long-married painter’s relationship with May was intense but fundamentally platonic, despite the passionate effusions in his many letters to her. He died in 1898, shortly after Amy’s marriage to a soldier. Though May enjoyed close friendships with other distinguished men and went on to do valuable work during WWI, she never quite recovered from the loss of Burne-Jones. She was hit hard again in 1910 when Amy “died of a broken heart,” as May told her grandchildren. An enigmatic beauty who inspired three novelists and was loved by many men, Amy was never able to find love herself. Restless, she traveled constantly, perhaps developing a fatal opium habit in the Orient.
For American readers, a peek at British life upstairs as it really was.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-609-60999-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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