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VITA AND HAROLD

Name: VITA AND HAROLD
Author: Nigel Nicolson
ISBN: 0-399-13666-5

THE LETTERS OF VITA SACKVILLE-WEST AND HAROLD NICOLSON

edited by Nigel Nicolson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1992

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Nicolson's distillation of the letters between his parents- -poet/novelist Vita Sackville-West and diplomat Harold Nicolson- -further documents the extraordinary relationship he described in Portrait of a Marriage (1973; to be dramatized on PBS later this year). What do we learn from this intimate dialogue about the marriage that sustained itself from 1913 until Vita's death in 1962, through homosexual affairs and separations extensive enough to produce 10,000 letters? That the bond between Vita and Harold depended on affection, respect, love, and, perhaps above all, on a degree of tolerance and openness—at least on paper—that few couples could handle. Living very much their own lives (she talks about gardens and friends, he about the abdication of the soulless King Edward), they both were devoted to their two sons (though the boys are rarely mentioned), and they cared passionately for Sissinghurst Castle, where they built legendary gardens. Until Harold left the diplomatic corps in 1929, he invigorated the correspondence with eye-witness reports—some witty, others highly serious—from abroad: Constantinople, Berlin, Tehran. Working on the peace treaty in Paris in 1919, Harold describes the Arc de Triomphe after the signing as ``black with people watching the cars stream up the Avenue du Bois.'' The emotional wattage rises on the subject of Vita's notorious affair with Violet Trefusis. ``I wish Violet was dead,'' Harold writes. Later, Vita tells him that ``there is lots that is neither good or simple in me, and it is that part which is so tempted.'' Typically, she ends this letter with, ``my darling, my darling, I shall love you till I die.'' Most interesting is what Vita reveals about her intense relationship with Virginia Woolf (``angel of wit and intelligence''), who re- created Vita in Orlando. A vivid and extensive primary source on private lives—lives whose modernity reveals convention-flouting individuality and speaks much about Britain's upper class and its attitudes and freedoms.

Pub Date: July 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-399-13666-5

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

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)