The sisters’ trust that Mills was not a gossip is borne out in this charming portrait of a small Southern town and its most...
In her first book, a journalist offers a gentle, loving portrait of a reclusive writer.
After To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, Harper Lee (b. 1926) was overwhelmed with attention. She sat for interviews, signed so many copies of the novel that she developed tendonitis, and watched with alarm as Monroeville, Alabama, the small town in which she lived, was turned into a tourist attraction. Then she retreated, refusing to talk to reporters or cooperate with biographers, determined to live her life quietly and privately. In 2001, when Mills came to Monroeville on assignment from the Chicago Tribune, she expected to take notes on the town’s ambience and, at most, to interview a few people who knew Lee. But Lee—known by her first name, Nelle—and her 89-year-old sister, Alice, a lawyer, were interested in Chicago’s One Book, One Chicago program, which had chosen Mockingbird for that year’s citywide reading. When Mills rang the doorbell at the Lees’ home, Alice invited her in for a long conversation. This led to repeated visits and resulted in a friendship that continues, even with both sisters now in assisted living facilities. Mills portrays Nelle as a grown-up Scout, the feisty and defiant heroine of Mockingbird. “Even at their ages,” writes the author, “it was clear Alice was the steady, responsible older sister, and Nelle Harper the spirited, spontaneous younger one.” The sisters lived modestly, with an eclectic circle of friends that included “a retired hairdresser, a pharmacy clerk, a one-time librarian, and a former bookkeeper who also was the wife of a retired bank president.” Often, friends joined in the outings, breakfasts and dinners that Mills and Lee shared. Together, they watched two movies about Truman Capote, with whom Lee had worked as researcher for In Cold Blood; their relationship soured later. “Truman was a world-class gossip,” Lee told Mills.
The sisters’ trust that Mills was not a gossip is borne out in this charming portrait of a small Southern town and its most famous resident.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-519-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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