The most riveting personality in this thin biography by freelance writer Burleigh is not its murdered subject, Georgetown socialite Mary Meyer, but instead the lawyer who successfully defended the murder suspect. Meyer was the divorced wife of CIA division chief Cord Meyer and one of the parade of women who had affairs with President John F. Kennedy. Her sexual liaison with the president probably ended in late 1962. She was murdered in October 1964. A black man, Ray Crump, who had no good explanation for his presence near the murder scene, was arrested and tried. The prosecution couldn—t prove its case, and Crump was found not guilty. (Crump’s lawyer was Dovey Roundtree, who had worked her way through college as a domestic, went on to become a successful criminal defense lawyer in Washington, and could, as she said, ‘’ . . . talk the fat off a hog.”) The real controversy surrounding Mary Meyer’s murder wasn—t the Crump verdict but the fact that her diary—which presumably contained details of her affair with JFK and possibly CIA secrets—went missing. Conspiracy theories were swirling around the Kennedy assassination, and Mary’s death was incorporated into some of those theories. Journalist Burleigh examines the evidence without turning up much that is new; the purpose of her book is to tell Mary’s not very interesting story. Well-born into the Pinchot family, well-bred (Vassar), and well-connected, Mary was also attractive, intelligent, and charming. She developed a minor talent as a painter; her friends admired her for a somewhat free-spirited lifestyle (she questioned Timothy Leary on how to guide LSD sessions). Short on solid information—many firsthand sources are dead or not talking, and Mary’s papers were destroyed—the book is also carelessly written and carelessly edited. Another “I Slept With JFK” scenario, disingenuously and pretentiously veiled as the story of a “woman on a quest.” (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10629-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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