Keeping on the level of the quotidian, Weideger’s work transports and entertains. But her journalistic endeavors are cobbled...
A mixed plunge into Venetian living.
Captivated by the delight that Venice casts over visitors—and ready for a change from all that is London—Weideger (Gilding the Acorn, not reviewed) rents an apartment in Venice for a month. What is an extraordinarily artistic and sensual city at first glance proves to be just the same on the everyday level for Weideger as she learns to find her way around the neighborhood she’s landed in. Drawn by the city’s beauty, she now wants its intimacy, to know its idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes. No shrinking violet, she fights for what she wants, be it a transportation pass, a chocolate pastry, or an apartment. Her living arrangements come in for ample description, but that’s no problem for the reader, since she winds up in an old palace with excellent views and detailing: “Two hundred years before, a master craftsman had been at work in this room. Clearly he had been a man with a light touch and an inclination to make inert materials dance.” Good, informal writing on the history of the family who owned the palace, and on Weideger’s rambles through the Jewish past of the city, bump up against stuffier material on the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation and art-preservation charities. Weideger is a journalist, and some of these sections give the feeling that she wanted to get extra mileage out of research for another project. Infinitely more appealing are her run-ins with her landlady (rather than the relationships she forms with Guggenheim’s heirs), and better by far is her story of a wicked car accident over her forays into flood-control planning.
Keeping on the level of the quotidian, Weideger’s work transports and entertains. But her journalistic endeavors are cobbled poorly to the personal, like awkwardly high new heels on comfy old shoes.Pub Date: June 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-671-04729-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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
SEEN & HEARD
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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