A memoir to savor for its many riches and, most of all, its zest.
Humorous and insightful chronicle of a long life filled with interesting friends and experiences, shared for nearly six decades with an exceptional man.
Still writing at 87 (the eponymous column for her local New Hampshire paper), Campion is one of those rare people who can recall both joyously and wisely a full existence, dwelling mostly in sunny uplands rather than the inevitable dark valleys. She is an accomplished raconteur; her stories of dinners with Craig Claiborne; a 1992 interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton (a fellow Wellesley graduate); and a conversation with E.B. White are exemplary, entertaining as well as informative. But these delightful anecdotes are only part of a book as notable for its personal testament as for its portrait of the early 20th century. In an address to her class of 1938 reunion—now a classic after its 1993 publication in The Boston Globe—Campion listed all the changes her generation had experienced. “We were before television, penicillin, nylon, Xerox,” she noted. “Wellesley ‘girls’ were forbidden to wear pants and Harvard ‘boys’ thought only Hillbillies wore blue jeans . . . we had real fountain pens with real bottles of ink . . . and when Ray Noble slowly sang ‘The Very Thought of You’ we melted.” Born in 1917 in Hawaii, where her military father was stationed, she numbered among her experiences as an army brat a voyage to Manila on the same boat as the honeymooning General MacArthur and a stint in Panama. In her last year at Wellesley, she met husband-to-be Tom Campion, a Harvard senior who taught her “that laughter is life’s best solvent.” This lesson helped as Tom changed jobs four times, they raised five children (one of whom had a breakdown in college), and she wrote seven books, including one that became the movie The Long Gray Line.
A memoir to savor for its many riches and, most of all, its zest.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2004
ISBN: 1-58465-407-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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