A biography with narrative muscle and thrilling historical relevance.
O’Faolain, mistress of the memoir (Almost There, 2003, etc.), meets her match in fellow Irishwoman Chicago May, feisty turn-of-the-century feminist and queen of crooks.
O’Faolain’s biography of May Duignan, who fled County Longford, Ireland, for New York in 1890, is as much about the author, her beleaguered Irish clan and the tribulations of Irish emigration as it is about her notorious subject. O’Faolain manages to weave the destiny of an entire people into the flight of auburn-haired, buxom 19-year-old May, from her impoverished home in Edenmore, as her mother was delivering yet another baby the family could ill afford to raise. May fled with the family’s savings; the fugitive booked cabin class to New York, rather than steerage, in the first of her devil-may-care acts that would come to characterize her in the new world. From Nebraska, where she supposedly had an uncle, to cities teeming with vice such as Chicago and New York, as well as cities overseas, she capitalized on her good looks by learning quickly how to make a sucker of an admirer, and soon excelled as a “badger” in luring men into rooms where they would be fleeced. Flush from her prostitution earnings, ruthless May—“the tart who could bite diamonds out of tie-pins”—fell in with safe-cracker Eddie Guerin, and their American Express heist in Paris proved her eventual downfall. O’Faolain quotes extensively from May’s end-of-life, picaresque 1928 autobiography, Chicago May, Her Story, which the author found in the New York Public Library. Employing her own autobiographical skills and intimacy with Irish sob stories (see Are You Somebody?, 1998), O’Faolain speculates endlessly on May’s motivation and intention, tracking years of brutal incarceration, fly-by-night grifting and illness, ending in May’s heartbreaking “disillusion with the act of autobiography itself.”
A biography with narrative muscle and thrilling historical relevance.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2005
ISBN: 1-57322-320-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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