Entertaining social history, though the author’s fondness for long quotes and many, many examples make it more fun to browse...
After surveying grandmother Vanessa Bell’s home in Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden (not reviewed), Nicholson moves on to a broader but related subject: lifestyles of the poor and avant-garde.
“I make no apology for my fascination with the laundry-list view of history,” writes the author, who deems domestic arrangements and personal habits “the kind of detail I find not only revealing but indispensable to understanding.” This everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach is most effective when applied to less familiar material. Chapters on bohemian attitudes toward marriage, sex, and feminism tend to degenerate into, yes, laundry lists of famously unconventional ménages (Laura Riding, Robert and Nancy Graves; Duncan Grant, Vanessa and Clive Bell, etc.) and yet another portrait of New Women scandalizing the bourgeoisie with their short hair and cigarettes. But when Nicholson delves into childrearing, clothes, food, and housework, she vividly delineates just how revolutionary Britain’s early-20th-century bohemians were. (She seems unaware that an American avant-garde was pursuing a similar course.) The author’s résumé of the ridiculous amount of tight-fitting attire well-bred Edwardians, male and female, had to change in and out of several times a day, for example, reminds us how liberating were the loose, colorful garments painter Augustus John and others wore, romantically emulating carefree gypsies. Dirty, squalid garrets make more sense after Nicholson points out that the alternative before modern appliances was a houseful of servants, the money to pay them, and hours spent supervising them. The avant-garde prided themselves on caring about art, not appearances, and while the author doesn’t ignore the contradictions involved in generally middle-class rebels living like the most disreputable poor, she respects their commitment to a freer existence. As well as the usual Bloomsbury suspects, Nicholson draws her examples from other names well known in British cultural gossip: Cyril Connolly, Nancy Cunard, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Ford Madox Ford, etc., etc.
Entertaining social history, though the author’s fondness for long quotes and many, many examples make it more fun to browse than to read cover-to-cover.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-054845-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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