A personal fascination that never lifts off the page to engage either as history or as romance. (16 pp. b&w photos, not...
Randall, who grew up on Long Island’s North Shore surrounded by the stately homes built during “the Gold Coast Era,” offers an odd memoir of her experiences living in one of its remaining mansions.
During the Gold Coast’s heyday in the 1920s, some 600 villas, chateaux, and castles looked over Long Island Sound. “The members of this elite society, regardless of where they came from, set out to play at being English,” writes Randall. “Hunt clubs, polo games, and Edwardian teas became a way of life.” At first, she seems to have no time for such extravagant bijouterie, but soon enough the mansions become an “all-consuming obsession”; she compiles a photographic record of the remaining ones and arranges for them to be used for fashion photo shoots. When Randall actually moves into the Woolworth estate, Winfield, she is overwhelmed by the sheer history and psychic energy of the house. She hears disembodied voices (writing in one of the more provocative passages that “marble had the ability to trap vibrational sounds for an indefinite period”) and finds hidden chambers; she holds seances; she has dark and spooky encounters with the hired help. Although Randall’s forebodings don’t feel stagy, exactly, they lack the creepy substance of bone-deep intuition. Her plausibility isn’t helped by her purple prose: “I was aware of the still and pungent air while silvery-winged birds who flew only at night sang their canticles of insensible gloom.” Randall suggests in closing that we would do well “to better understand the entire spectrum of subtle energies, or soul essences, that appear to linger long after we’re gone.” Readers may well feel that if the author had better understood them herself she would have produced a more rewarding account of it all.
A personal fascination that never lifts off the page to engage either as history or as romance. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30982-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
