A thin slice of the upper-upper-crust.
The daughter of the eighth Marquess of Londonderry chronicles her aristocratic life in a low-key, chatty memoir chock-full of famous names.
Born in 1934, Annabel grew up in resplendent wealth amid various grand country houses in Scotland and Ireland. Her grandmother was a great political hostess, linked to the royal family, and at the Queen’s coronation in 1953 her older sister was one of the six chosen maids of honor. Annabel’s “coming out” was overshadowed by the ghastly death from mouth cancer of her adored mother, a commoner who had married her father for love. At age 19, Annabel quietly married Mark Birley, a member of her set and son of portrait painter Oswald Birley. A gambler and business mind, Mark started up several notable London society night spots, including Harry’s Bar and Annabel’s, one of the swinging ’60s most famous clubs, located in the basement of 44 Berkeley Square. There, the flesh-and-blood Annabel met French-English businessman Jimmy Goldsmith, who marketed pharmaceutical products, was friendly with Margaret Thatcher, and forged the reactionary Referendum Party. Jimmy had a family in France and a mistress in New York, but that didn’t impede him and Annabel from marrying and having three children together. (“If you marry your mistress,” Goldsmith once wisecracked, “you create a vacancy.”) Although Jimmy often lived elsewhere, leaving Annabel and the children at their Ormeley house near Richmond Park, they vacationed together in exotic spots, an arrangement that seems to have suited his pampered and undemanding wife. Her memoir is full of dogs and children, specific about names and places—Princess Diana was a friend, so were Claus and Sunny von Bülow; Armand Hammer once made a pass at her—but emotionally spotty.
A thin slice of the upper-upper-crust.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-297-82966-1
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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