No literary tell-all, this chatty yet reflective history instead charts the Lowell family’s dissolution through money and mental illness. With considerable narrative deftness, novelist Stuart (Men in Trouble, 1998) motors through centuries of Lowells (James Russell was Robert Lowell’s great-granduncle, Amy a distant cousin) and related families, concentrating on some of Bobby’s (his family nickname) pivotal relations. There was his “cold and proper” mother, Charlotte Lowell; grandfather Arthur Winslow, whose approval he craved; and stern, rich Aunt Sarah, who loved yet then spurned Bobby. Sarah, the “sweet, silly” baby sister of Charlotte, centered the clan, revealing their occasional artistic blind spots (“Why doesn’t Bobby write about the sea?— she once asked. “It’s so pretty”) and holding the family together even when it didn’t want that. Depression-era real-estate investments and disinheritance in the 1960s lost the family money, and Stuart offers enough equivocation about it for cynics to call this the “I was related to Lowell and all I got was a lousy book contract” memoir. Not only did Great-uncle Cot (Sarah’s husband) bequeath fortune and effects to museums, but Stuart was also denied the official family “Sarah” painting by John Singleton Copley because she “didn’t have a proper wall to hang it on.” Stuart, who rebelled her way through the 1970s, knows the score: “we asked for such treatment, though we didn’t like it when we got it.” The family also lost money when financing psychiatric treatment for Bobby, for Stuart’s mother and brother, and others. Stuart describes the roller-coaster of manic-depression with precision and compassion; her quotations from Bobby’s works are particularly useful. Above all, she is matter-of-fact. Though her glib asides sometimes backfire and her analysis lacks distance, this is an idiosyncratic alternative view of a leading American literary family. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017689-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
