No fascinating new dish here, but a meat-and-potatoes biography.
A pretty streetwalker from northern England becomes a painter’s model, high-class courtesan and then mistress to Lord Nelson himself in this businesslike portrait of Emma Hamilton.
British historian Williams begins her subject’s rags-to-riches story in squalid, coal-rich Ness, near Liverpool, where Emma, née Amy Lyon, was forced in her early teens to become a servant when her alcoholic and possibly tubercular father killed himself. When she moved to London, the city’s amusements proved more compelling than scrubbing floors; her employer cast her out in the street, but her good looks and determination secured her a job at Drury Lane as a wardrobe mistress, while she moonlighted as a model for artists George Romney and Joshua Reynolds. Top-drawer brothel work followed, then stag parties hosted by aristocrats like Sir Harry of Uppark, who got her pregnant and then passed her off to Charles Grenville of Paddington. She changed her name to Emma Hart and sent for her mother to keep house for her. Once Grenville grew tired of her, she was handed off to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, who lavished her with riches and actually married her, making her a lady and favorite of aristocrats eager to wear their fashions “à la Emma.” Nuts-and-bolts prose recounts Emma’s incredible rise without a lot of razzle-dazzle: Moving to Naples, she grew close to Queen Maria Carolina and met Lord Nelson on his way through the Mediterranean to resist Napoleon’s troops in 1798. Battered, with only one eye and one arm remaining after the Battle of the Nile, the married admiral soon fell for the charming hostess, who set about cuckolding her husband and bearing Lord Nelson a child, to the delight of the press. In her debut, Williams writes sternly of her often silly protagonist, but drops the occasional feminist justification, e.g., “Despite all her charisma, intelligence, and charm, Emma had no rights and had to rely on what she could win from men.”
No fascinating new dish here, but a meat-and-potatoes biography.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46194-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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