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PALM BEACH BABYLON

SINS, SCAMS AND SCANDALS

An overdose of unabashed sensationalism, then, that will ultimately turn off all but the most avidly celebrity-hungry...

A century's worth of crimes, sex scandals, and other foibles of the idle rich, rewarmed by two New York Post reporters who covered the William Kennedy Smith rape trial.

Henry Flagler created Palm Beach in the 1890's by erecting a luxury hotel and building a railroad to import wealthy northerners. The Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies arrived; fancy parties (including drag balls) became the town obsession; and the ocean- front community grew famous as a destination of choice for the nation's rich. Scandal—from the dalliances of Isadora Duncan to the Smith rape trial—followed. Weiss and Hoffman chronicle every whisper of controversy about the famous names—the Kennedys, John Lennon, the Trumps, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, Roxanne Pulitzer. And there's lots of unpleasantness about less famous residents as well: the bored wife who cruised local high schools for sex partners; the drunken heirs; the married couples whose spats turned violent. The government of Palm Beach also doesn't escape scrutiny: For years, domestic workers were required to carry identification cards. The focus throughout is on salacious dirt: a chapter on JFK is justified by the fact that he spent time in Palm Beach, but the authors take the opportunity to reprint nearly every rumor about his sexual escapades. Weiss and Hoffmann have chosen to go for exhaustive detail rather than originality or unimpeachable sources (books like C. David Heymann's A Woman Named Jackie are cited).

An overdose of unabashed sensationalism, then, that will ultimately turn off all but the most avidly celebrity-hungry ambulance-chasers.

Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1-55972-141-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Birch Lane Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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