An informative if scattershot account by Ross (Takes,1983, etc.) of her 40-year romance with New Yorker editor William Shawn. Ross, who joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1945, makes no apologies for her lengthy affair with the long-married Shawn, though she goes to great (and circular) lengths to explain and excuse it. “I couldn’t reconcile myself to being a —mistress.— I didn’t feel like one,” she writes. “Bill told me I was his —wife.— “ The entire affair was conducted with the full knowledge of Shawn’s real wife, Cecille: He and Ross kept an apartment about 12 blocks from where Mrs. Shawn and their children lived. Ross is vague and sparing with the logistics, yet apparently Shawn would usually sleep at home (where he kept a private phone in the bedroom “with a number he gave solely to me”), while taking his meals and spending most evenings with Ross (their apartment’s previous tenant had been Marlene Dietrich). Ross notes “the familiar misery in his face” after doing time en famille; although he —longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures,— evidently he “never became inured to his guilt.” There’s a dated and doltish innocence in her presentation of this material, a tendency to dote goggle-eyed on Shawn that belies her true wit; Ross, after all, is well known as a tough-minded and persevering writer/reporter. Some passages are nearly incomprehensible, with few or no transitions to prepare or conclude them. Ross, who left the New Yorker with Shawn in 1987, returned in 1993, and compares Tina Brown’s regime favorably with that of her flame. Of historical interest are her recollections of J.D. Salinger and Shawn’s publication of “Zooey” over the objections of his own fiction editors. Both too quirky and too chatty; Ross is at her best when sticking to writers, writing, and Shawn’s editing. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-50119-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
