With amiable chutzpah, the head of the decorative arts department at Sotheby's tells the story of his fabulous rise in the arts and society. ``Collecting at Sotheby's is the penultimate act,'' declares Woolley. After a brief post-college apprenticeship at A La Vieille Russie, the posh antiques store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Woolley, then 24, was hired by Sotheby Parke Bernet to work in its furniture department. But at his first meeting with Peregrine Pollen, Peter Wilson, and Marcus Linnellrespectively president, chairman, and head of decorative arts at Sotheby's at that timethe young upstart began telling them what they were doing wrong. While working at A La Vieille Russie, Woolley had made a killing on Russian art from Sotheby's because the works were undervalued. He told them that they needed to auction specific artworks separately from an estate sale and to make sure that all the significant collectors knew about them. Somehow Woolley not only convinced them to schedule a sale on Russian art, he also was put in charge of the sale and was allowed to auctioneer it himself. Woolley proved himself to be not only knowledgeable but cool with the gavel and a natural ham. Soon he was being sent on buying trips to Russia. At 30 he was made senior vice president and head of decorative arts. That same year he met Jeffrey Childs, who became his longtime lover. Childs, however, continued to sleep with many other men. He contracted AIDS and died in 1987. Woolley put his auctioneering skills to good use by conducting ``fantasy auctions'' for AIDS charities and other causes. Now, at age 50, Woolley also has AIDS, about which he is pragmatic. ``The ultimate act, of course,'' he writes, ``is dying.'' Refreshingly irreverent, Woolley lampoons his glittery worldand himselfwith good humor and style.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81385-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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