Honest but undistinguished.
A former New York publicist's memoir, written as an “open letter” to an imaginary daughter, about the circumstances and personal choices that caused her to remain childless.
Grossinger grew up the only daughter of a widowed Polish-born woman with a mysterious past. When she was 7, her father’s first cousin and scion of the family that owned Grossinger’s, “the most famous Jewish resort hotel in America,” invited mother and daughter to live in the Catskills. Treated like the poor relations they were, Karla worked long hours as a hostess without complaint while the author “did whatever the Grossinger family told me” and never expressed the anger she felt at the treatment she and her mother received. The author still managed to mingle with celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor, Jerry Lewis and Jackie Robinson, who stayed at the hotel as performers or visitors. Precocious and intelligent, she began college at Brandeis at age 15 and then began work as a fundraiser for the City of Hope in Los Angeles. After a brief marriage that would leave her emotionally shattered for life, Grossinger went to New York City, where she opened her own PR agency and represented such luminaries as Betty Friedan and Elsa Maxwell. Later, she became a publicist for Playboy and the infamous Playboy Club, and after that, a successful travel writer. Despite her career triumphs, Grossinger never came to terms with her husband’s rejection of her and became a woman who “desperately feared commitment.” Eventually, she found long-term love, but it was with a married man who refused to “break up his home any more than it was already broken.” Grossinger does not regret the trajectory of her remarkable life, nor does she apologize for it, but the narrative is disappointingly pedestrian and offers only glimmers of poignancy.
Honest but undistinguished.Pub Date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-615-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
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