Feminists and fans of Nin’s work will enjoy this unique insider’s portrait of a complex, pivotal figure in women’s...
Getting to know lust, love, and Anaïs Nin (1903-1977).
In 1962, a month before she turned 18, Rainer (Your Life as Story, 1997, etc.) met Cuban-born Nin, the noted diarist, famous lover of Henry Miller, and popular erotica author, at Nin’s Greenwich Village apartment while on an errand for her godmother, Lenore Tawney, the noted fabric artist. Rainer was attending a Catholic high school and still a virgin. She met Nin’s supportive husband, Hugo Guiler, Caresse Crosby, founder of Black Sun Press, and Nin’s 30-something friend Jean-Jacques. In a Delta of Venus manner, the impressionable author describes how she went with them to a night club, danced, drank, smoked pot, and, later, experienced with Jean-Jacques what “today…would likely be considered a form of date rape.” So begins her spicy and saucy hybrid of memoir and novel. This gives her the freedom to fictionalize events and encounters whenever she feels it appropriate. Over the next 15 years, up to Nin’s death in 1977, she became a close friend and mentor to Rainer, encouraging her writing and advising her on lifestyle matters—mostly sexual. Rainer became a devotee of Nin’s philosophy of life: “A woman has an equal right to pleasure as a man.” She was dazzled by Nin’s persona, beauty, and sexual history. When Rainer became a college professor—she eventually went on to co-found the UCLA Women’s Studies Program—she was able to have Nin give talks to her students. She enjoyed her new life of sexual freedom, the parties, new friends, and trips, many to visit Nin’s other husband in California, the “gorgeous” Rupert Pole, getting herself awkwardly involved in Nin’s secret, two-husband juggling act. Over time, she realized that Nin was a “deeply flawed person—a narcissist, a bigamist, a liar, and a deviant,” but she was also “so loveable.”
Feminists and fans of Nin’s work will enjoy this unique insider’s portrait of a complex, pivotal figure in women’s liberation.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-778-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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.
