In a world continually shocked—and feigning disgust—by the doings of Britney and Paris, Peaches & Daddy provides a...
Lively, intelligently rendered account of a largely forgotten 1920s tabloid scandal.
In gilded, pre-Depression New York City, real-estate tycoon and man about town Edward “Daddy” Browning courted and married “Peaches” Heenan, a 15-year-old aspiring flapper less than one-third his age. Debut author Greenburg zestfully recounts the sordid story of conspicuous consumption, outlandish antics for the benefit of a voracious press corps and—hardly ten months after the marriage—a divorce trial that challenged prevailing standards of decency. Neither wife nor husband emerges unscathed in his telling, and certainly not the yellow journalists who lapped up the scandal and dished it out to a titillated public in real time. Most of the book revolves around Daddy, a man whose eye for real estate helped shape the New York City skyline. His desperate need for publicity, however, bordered on the pathological, and his interest in young women cast even his charitable acts under a cloud of suspicion. Newly concerned with the social well-being of children, authorities attempted to thwart his 1926 marriage to Peaches and to take away the daughter adopted during a previous marriage. Peaches was no innocent victim. She gained Daddy’s sympathy with self-inflicted scars and walked off with his money the moment she was able. Greenburg’s blow-by-blow narrative, set against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties’ changing sexual mores, makes for riveting reading, especially since the author enriches it by ably recounting the parallel story of the rise of tabloid journalism.
In a world continually shocked—and feigning disgust—by the doings of Britney and Paris, Peaches & Daddy provides a strange but certain comfort.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-046-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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