According to Bradford (The Reluctant King, 1990, etc.), poet, writer, and art critic Sacheverell (``Sachie'') Sitwell (1897-1988) formed—along with his brother, Osbert, and sister, Edith—a cult of his own, albeit one that was self-involved, effete, and aesthetically and politically out of tune with his times. Conceived in ``ritual deliberation'' to satisfy the dynastic aspirations of their father, Sir George Sitwell, the siblings grew up as isolated eccentrics in their ancestral estate in Derbyshire. Physically impressive as adults—each was over six feet tall with a bony face and pronounced nose—the three apparently wrote in order to compensate for emotional deprivations. They were so fiercely possessive of one another that Sachie's marriage at age 26 to an 18-year-old Canadian was a family trauma. The union produced two sons, to whom neither parent seemed closely attached; many exotic travels (and books about them); dinners; debts; and affairs, including Sachie's last one, with ballet dancer Moira Shearer. Meanwhile, Sachie was an influential art critic who wrote in the tradition of Ruskin, interpreting architecture, primarily baroque and gothic. His poetry was voluminous but mannered and out of touch with the social and political issues, psychological intensity, and experimentation that characterized the work of Virginia Woolf, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and other illuminati of his generation. Sachie was attacked by F.R. Leavis, Geoffrey Grigson, and Wyndham Lewis, whose parody, The Apes of God, ridiculed his anachronistic values and right-wing politics—but his circle included Harold Acton, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and T.S. Eliot, who called the siblings the ``Shitwells.'' In spite of numerous interviews with the living and research among the dead, Bradford's approach seems as detached, impersonal, and aloof as Sachie himself—a man who may have had no secrets, or who perhaps could hide them even from himself. (Sachie shared the family talent for being photographed, wonderfully represented here in portraits by, among others, his good friend Sir Cecil Beaton.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-26789-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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