Romantic family history meets interior design and gardening in this life of Virginia-born Nancy Lancaster, who gets credit here for creating the English Country style—homey chintz in baronial spaces. Freelance writer Becker skillfully melds third-person biography and first-person memoir (based on Lancaster's writings and Becker's interviews with her) in this unusual narrative. Lancaster's life story begins in a cottage in Virginia, where she was born, and ends in a cottage in England, where she died in August 1994 at the age of 96. In between were three husbands and a life of riding, shooting, and shopping for the furniture and fixtures that would justify her reputation as an interior designer. It was Lancaster's talent to bring comfort and warmth to tired and gloomy manor rooms without damaging a sense of history and authentic detail. Born to the oldest of the famously beautiful Langhorne sisters—her aunts included Lady Astor and the wife of artist Charles Dana Gibson—Lancaster first married Henry Field (of Chicago's Marshall Field family). Widowed within five months, she next married Ronald Tree, a wealthy American who made his home in England and his reputation as a member of Parliament. It was as Mrs. Tree that Lancaster became known as a designer and hostess in a series of houses that culminated in Ditchley, the English manor where Winston Churchill spent weekends during WW II. After a divorce from Tree and a brief third marriage (to one Jubie Lancaster), she bought a decorating business, Colefax and Fowler, which became one of England's most prestigious firms. A manual of room arrangement and garden design combined with a view of a now-extinct lifestyle where newspapers were ironed for weekend guests that should capture students of design and history. (16 pages color photos, 150 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-56791-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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