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RAGE FOR FAME

THE ASCENT OF CLARE BOOTHE LUCE

Morris dishes the fascinating dirt on—and logs the remarkable accomplishments of—this controversial author, social climber, magazine editor, athlete, foreign correspondent, and trophy wife. Most people these days know Clare Boothe Luce as the author of the acid-tongued movie classic The Women, which made Jungle Red nail polish a synonym for social intrigue and betrayal. Morris (Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 1980), who had access to Luce in the last years of her life and to the letters, journals, and documents that Luce kept from her adolescence, blends the killer nail color with a more subtle palette in a complex portrait of an intelligent, ambitious, and multi-faceted woman who was also beautiful, charming, witty, and always elegantly turned out. However, there was no silver spoon in Clare's mouth when she was born in 1903, the illegitimate child of an upwardly striving young mother, who at some point in Luce's childhood probably earned a living as a call girl. That interfered with the quest of neither mother nor daughter for wealthy, well-connected partners. Clare's first husband was rich, social, alcoholic George Brokaw. After their divorce, she begged a job from magazine publisher CondÇ Nast. Within a few years she was managing editor of Vanity Fair, a playwright, essayist, and the object of Henry Luce's desire. Married to Luce, she went on to become a war correspondent, filing reports for the new Life magazine. The controversy surrounding her often obscured the fact that she was a talented writer and an astute, if sometimes venomous, reporter. Lap up Volume I, with its intimate and sometimes contradictary detail: Clare Boothe Luce, her Vionnet dresses fitted in Paris, as feminist icon. Watch for Volume II—Clare as congresswoman and US ambassador. (45 b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Vanity Fair; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)

Pub Date: June 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-394-57555-5

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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