Far too polite for its—or our—good.
Fulsome, over-affectionate treatment of the doyenne who dominated the etiquette market for decades.
Claridge (Norman Rockwell, 2001, etc.) begins with a comparison between Emily Post (1872–1960) and anthropologist Ruth Benedict—and that’s just a taste of the puffery to come. The author proceeds to the most humiliating experience of Post’s life: her philandering husband’s infidelity in 1905 and the splashy newspaper coverage of it. Then the narrative moves back to Emily’s family history. Her father, Bruce Price, was a noted architect, and the little girl grew up in a world of servants and high society. At her 1889 debut, “she glowed” as the belle of the ball, according to Claridge, and that was the night she fell in love with Edwin Post. Their marriage, however, quickly disintegrated; the author describes Edwin as an alpha male in almost a prehistoric sense. Emily turned to writing and to entertaining; she was, writes Claridge, “especially pretty these days, trim with a rosy complexion, a tireless hostess.” This sort of treacly prose oversweetens far too many paragraphs. The author’s research seems thorough, but her documentation is uneven; several quotations from Edith Wharton have no endnote to identify them. Post published a few lightweight novels and gradually established herself as a minor New York literary figure. (She attended Mark Twain’s 70th birthday bash.) She seems to have hatched the idea for Etiquette in 1911; the first edition appeared in 1922, the 14th and final in 1955. The book’s enormous popularity finally brought her the celebrity she’d long craved. She had a newspaper column and a radio show; the pages of the nation’s women’s magazines were open to her; she wrote an engaging book about a cross-country car trip in 1915. Post was up-to-date enough to float an unsuccessful idea for a TV show, but she slowly faded away with dementia in the ’50s.
Far too polite for its—or our—good.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-50921-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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