A rehash of the life of Jackie as she turns 65: a collection of old news, non-news, and tabloid analysis. Kennedy chronicler David (Good Ted, Bad Ted: The Two Faces of Edward M. Kennedy, 1993) takes us on a walking tour of Jackie's Manhattan. Did you know, for example, that Jackie jogs clockwise around the Central Park reservoir instead of counterclockwise like the other runners (to avoid photographers on her route)? Or that she buys her sweatpants at the Gap at 86th and Madison? Although Jackie had a facelift in 1979, her hands have prominent veins and ``brown and yellow blotches of varying sizes.'' It can't be any fun churning out copy about a subject who does not give interviews. David has spent valuable time in the library and has interviewed colleagues, servants, tradespeople, and Kennedy relatives to get even the smell of a scoop, but his pickings are slim. This is a textbook on how to make short, impersonal interviews seem like page-one stories. As if we were reading a Christmas letter, we learn that Mrs. Onassis exercises regularly, gets plenty of sleep, and eats healthfully. Her newest roommate is chubby, married diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman. She still doesn't get along with the other Kennedy women (``They were clam chowder, she was lobster bisque''), and she vacations on Martha's Vineyard, where she had a disagreement with the Wampanoag Indians. (Apparently, Wampanoag chief Moshup and his wife, Old Squant, are buried on her private beach.) Regrettably she has been diagnosed with lymphoma, but the prognosis is optimistic. The children and grandchildren are healthy, and John John is no longer dating Madonna. To be read under the hair dryer, but not really thrilling enough to take home. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 50,000; first serial to New Woman)
Pub Date: July 28, 1994
ISBN: 1-55972-234-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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
SEEN & HEARD
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