Next book

NANCY LANCASTER

HER LIFE, HER WORLD, HER ART

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

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Next book

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Close Quickview