A chatty self-portrait, much of it via press clips and other friends' recollections, of life in the entertainment wing of the Social Register. Duchin's early history is dramatic. The press called his parents' marriage ``a romance between Broadway and Park Avenue,'' but Duchin contends that his society bandleader father's Ukrainian Jewish background made acceptance difficult within his mother Marjorie Oelrichs's debutante circle. His mother died six days after his birth, and his father traveled constantly, so he became an ``orphan,'' growing up an honorary WASP on the estate of Averell Harriman, a friend of Marjorie's. Duchin describes life in the mansion with a fond richness of detail. Harriman was parsimonious and self-involved, but his wife, Marie, acted as a parent to Peter, shepherding his entrance into Hotchkiss and Yale, approving of his junior year abroad in Paris, where he lived the high life with George Plimpton and the rest of the Paris Review crowd. Duchin slid (effortlessly, it seems) into a showbiz career and, despite his reservations about the famous Duchin piano style (young Peter dug Bud Powell and disliked frilliness), found himself seeking society gigs in the mold of his father, Eddy. Duchin is cheerily upfront about his advantages, and his musical observations can be sharp, as in his discovery that WASPs can't dance but respond to a march beat, or a description of the night he met Arthur Rubinstein, who played ``a majestic Chopin polonaise with the same improvisatory approach I might have used for jazz.'' Duchin is what he is, and the book overflows with brief tales of Averell and Jock, Gloria and Brooke, Leland and Kitty. True to his piano style, it's upbeat and smartly paced—though you get the sense he's dutifully marching you through. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41418-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
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