Suffice it to say, more than 50 years on, explorations of the truths and fictions of Camelot continue to mesmerize.
A story of sisterhood that reveals how all the fortune and fame in the world can’t assuage sibling rivalry.
With the exception of their parents’ divorce, it’s hard to imagine a more charmed youth than that of young Jacqueline and Lee Bouvier. These two remarkable women, who would go on to become first lady to President John F. Kennedy and princess to Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill, had seemingly every possible advantage. However, Vanity Fair vets Kashner and Shoenberger (co-authors: Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, 2010, etc.) write, the sisters’ relationship was a lifelong balance of love and envy. Case in point: Jackie would go on to marry Aristotle Onassis, Lee’s former lover. With entirely opposite personalities—Lee was outgoing and dramatic, Jackie demur and shy—each seemingly wound up with what would have been the other’s ideal life. In this well-researched dual biography, the authors describe how that fate would both haunt and help them. But while the story is essentially about the sisters, the narrative favors Lee’s perspective, showcasing the often misunderstood socialite’s battle with wanting to be more than just a pretty face. Of course, it was hard to shake that label given the philosophy the girls’ father—failed Wall Street stock broker and alcoholic John Vernou Bouvier III—ingrained in them: “Style…is not a function of how rich you are or even who you are. Style is more a habit of mind that puts quality before quantity, noble struggle before mere achievement, honor before opulence. It’s what you are….It’s what makes you a Bouvier.” Living up to such an ideal would become Lee’s Achilles heel, and her illustrious love life often overshadowed her attempts at self-actualization. Not surprisingly, the supporting casts—Truman Capote, Peter Beard et al.—in the lives of the Bouvier sisters were just as flawed and fascinating.
Suffice it to say, more than 50 years on, explorations of the truths and fictions of Camelot continue to mesmerize.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-236498-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
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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