Amid the current flood of dysfunctional-family memoirs, this one by biographer Bosworth (Diane Arbus, 1984, etc.) stands out for its lack of self-pity and its magnetic central figure, her father, Bartley Crum—a habituÇ in the realms of celebrity and power who was finally destroyed by personal weakness and devotion to principle. With their talent, elegance, and glamour, Bart and wife, Anna Gertrude Bosworth (known as ``Cutsie''), a former San Francisco reporter and novelist, must have resembled Dick and Nicole Diver to their friends. Approaching life with ``supreme self-confidence and an attitude of entitlement,'' Bart used his connections as a prominent San Francisco lawyer to gain entrÇe to Hollywood and Washington. Patricia and her brother, Bart Jr., grew up near the glow of celebrity, with visitors such as Montgomery Clift, Rita Hayworth (whom Bart represented in her divorce from Aly Kahn), and Wendell Willkie (whom Bart advised in the 1940 presidential campaign). Yet their father continually passed in and out on either business trips or one of his perpetual political crusades; a dismayed Cutsie retreated into sullenness and affairs. Then, when Bart denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee as an attorney for two members of the blacklisted ``Hollywood Ten,'' he was trailed by the FBI. Family troubles followed: insolvency, Bart's worsening addiction to alcohol and pills, Patricia's marital difficulties, Bart Jr.'s troubled youth and suicide, and, in 1959, after a disastrous appearance before the Senate Rackets Committee investigating Jimmy Hoffa, Bart Sr.'s own appointment in Samarra. In the aftermath, using her mother's diaries, interviews with colleagues, and her father's FBI dossier, Bosworth had to square her ``fantasy image of Daddy as Superman'' with the reality of a decent man forced to inform secretly to the FBI. An unflinchingly honest depiction of a family undone by the whirlwind revolving around an ebullient, compassionate man who was also a weak husband and father.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80809-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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