An unsatisfying portrait of a complex woman.
A portrait of a well-known philanthropist who kept her thoughts secret.
When Doris Duke (1912-1993) turned 21, she received an installment of $10 million from the trust she inherited from her billionaire father, tobacco tycoon James Buchanan “Buck” Duke. At the age of 25, she got another $10 million, and she was reputed to be the richest woman in the world. By the time she died, her net worth had burgeoned to $1.2 billion, mostly directed to the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to support arts and social services projects. Bingham (The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters, 2014, etc.) became fascinated by the woman whose image was relegated to a small photograph in a garden at Duke University, the institution her father had endowed. Although the author had access to a huge archive of Duke’s personal papers, none of these included diaries, journals, or more than a few letters. “Nothing,” Bingham notes, “that has been written or said about her can be proved—or disproved.” The lack of revealing material proves a challenge that the author fails to fully overcome. The biography offers a chronicle of Duke’s philanthropic largesse; her worldwide travels; luxurious residences; flamboyant marriages and love affairs; the “feuds, separations, and firings” that characterized her relationships with associates and employees; and her often puzzling friendships: with Imelda Marcos, for one, to whom Duke lent a great deal of money to help out with legal fees when she was accused of extortion; Pee-wee Herman, who earned Duke’s sympathy when he was hounded by tabloids after a sexual scandal; and especially Charlene Heffner, known as Chandi, who was 32 when she met 74-year-old Duke in 1986, moved into her home, and became her intimate companion. Duke formally adopted Chandi two years later; three years after that, she instructed her staff to eject Chandi from her home. After Duke died, her foundation settled with Chandi for $65 million in return for her silence about their relationship. Bingham, too, remains silent on the matter of Duke’s sexuality, emotional needs, and any glimpse of her inner life.
An unsatisfying portrait of a complex woman.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-14259-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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