by Tony Perrottet ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1998
Expatriate Australian writer-photographer Perrottet seeks to escape his East Village apartment in Manhattan by paying periodic visits to the world’s last frontiers. Perrottet, a contributing editor to Islands and frequent contributor to Esquire, Outside, et al., roams the globe with a $15 Chinese-made plastic camera, looking for the few out-of-the-way and obscure places not already invaded by McDonalds, television, and other writers similarly inclined. Actually, in this amusing volume, he is actively seeking out places with a literary connection to Defoe, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, and Maugham, among others. With that slender thread to connect the pieces, he visits the Juan Fernandez Islands, where Alexander Selkirk, real-life model for Robinson Crusoe, was marooned; Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Miss.; Hemingway’s haunts in an increasingly impoverished Havana; and Bruce Chatwin’s most famous destination, Tierra del Fuego. Perrottet alternates his 11 voyages with equally jaundiced tales set in the squalor of New York City, where he lives with his girlfriend in a veritable state of siege owing to his noisy, crazy neighbors. Thus, the book wanders amiably from one tropical-paradise hellhole (or one sub-Arctic hellhole) to another, returning regularly to the worst hellhole of all, Manhattan. At first glance, one fears that this will be just one more “around the world in a lousy mood,” dyspeptic travel book. But Perrottet is honest enough in his self-appraisal (and his recounting of endless bibulousness) to take the edge off what might otherwise be a nasty reading experience. Still, one wishes the photo reproductions were bigger and the individual pieces longer and more detailed. Not on a par with Chatwin or Raban, but a pleasant read for the armchair adventurer.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-207-18977-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flamingo/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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