It is difficult to discern the audience for this self-absorbed, often inartful memoir of an artist whose renown has not...
A memoir from publishing tycoon Nelson Doubleday’s daughter, an abstract expressionist painter.
Shuttled between a Long Island mansion and a South Carolina plantation, Neltje (she prefers to be recognized by her first name only) could seemingly never satisfy her father, and her biological mother comes across as a phantom of sorts, incapable of loving her daughter. Neltje's older brother, Nelson Jr., felt like a link to sanity for a while, but he eventually distanced himself from his sister. Daily life worsened considerably when Neltje was 9 and suffered repeated sexual abuse at the hands of a grown man trusted by her parents. Sent to school in Switzerland, she thrived briefly but ultimately suffered disappointment. In a memoir shot through with self-pity, Neltje chronicles the deaths of her sometimes-cruel, alcoholic father in 1949 and her mother 30 years later. The author sought refuge in marriage at age 18 and bore two children while in her early 20s, but none of that seemed to lift the despondency for long. Later in life, Neltje lost much of her inherited wealth to a dishonest second husband. Due to her elevated status, famous people flew in and out of her life; cameo appearances include W. Somerset Maugham, Theodore Roethke, and Irving Stone. The memoir takes a turn for the positive when Neltje moves west, finding geographical beauty and personal repose in Wyoming, which she has called home for nearly 50 years. Upon arriving in the West, the author decided to become a visual artist, and she also began to understand economic self-sufficiency and the theory and importance of practicing and preaching feminism.
It is difficult to discern the audience for this self-absorbed, often inartful memoir of an artist whose renown has not spread widely beyond the American West.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08814-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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