A lyrical character sketch, vivid even through the smoky glass of time.
Orange Prize–winning novelist Berne (The Ghost at the Table, 2006, etc.) shapes a lovely, melancholic biography of her grandmother, despite modest background information.
Because her grandmother left little behind when she died in 1932, the author admits to feeling at times like she is writing a ghost story. “I have to do a little historical tap dancing,” writes Berne, and she has a suave way of going about the process. It helps that she writes with polish and insight: “bereavement, like passion, has no proper notion of scale, and what form it takes depends mostly on the character of the mourner.” That bereavement was nurtured by her father, who lost his mother—Lucile Kroger Berne, daughter of the Cincinnati supermarket king—when he was six. With this biography, the author tenders a well-turned portrait of him as well—restless, irritable, charming, sympathetic, envious. Berne worked with what was available, including a few diaries and photo albums, but her greatest asset was Lucile’s milieu. Cincinnati at the turn of the century was a memorable place, and the rise of the Kroger supermarket empire becomes a satisfying rags-to-riches story in Berne’s capable hands. Lucile played a role in the creation of that empire, only to be shunted aside when her brothers returned from war. In addition to archival resources, the author taps the acumen of Susan Sontag, Ambrose Bierce, Virginia Woolf and others, rendering Lucile as a significant presence on the Wellesley College campus, where she matriculated, and during the year she spent in France helping knit the country together after World War I. Photographs from Lucile’s albums provide further context to her life.
A lyrical character sketch, vivid even through the smoky glass of time.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-625-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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