Vapid, once-over-lightly reminiscences from the scion of a publishing dynasty who, at age 83, looks back on a privileged, eventful life through rose-colored spectacles. One of five sons of William Randolph Hearst, ``Bill'' (as he's generally known) recalls a bicoastal boyhood that kept him shuttling between a 31-room apartment in Manhattan and his father's California pleasure dome of San Simeon. A college dropout, the author was given a job as a beat reporter on his father's New York American. Appointed publisher in 1937 of what was then the Journal- American, he quickly became a fixture on the cafÇ-society scene. During WW II, Hearst assigned himself to Europe as a correspondent; after the war, he returned to the same old stand, marrying his third wife (who's still with him) in 1948. Following the death of Hearst, Sr., in 1951, the author became the chain's editor-in- chief. Today, he remains titular head of editorial operations and writes a column for the empire's dwindling number of newspapers, but the family firm is controlled by professional managers. With scarcely a word here about his brothers (three of whom are now dead), Hearst offers often inane assessments of family members, friends, and acquaintances (on his father: ``He was in his own way like Pearl Buck who loved the land and the peasants of China''). Nor does Hearst provide keen insights on either the legendary journalists (Bob Considine, Dorothy Kilgallen, Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell) or many notables (Winston Churchill, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, George Patton, George Bernard Shaw, etc.) with whom he came in contact. Hearst has a few harsh words for de Gaulle, Nehru, Richard Berlin (a corporate executive he accuses of working against the founder's legacy), and the producers of Citizen Kane. Otherwise, even in the case of niece Patty's abduction, he is the soul of circumspect discretion. An insider's memoir that reads like the self-censored testimonial of a loyal hack. The wispy text has over 100 photographs and other illustrations, including cartoons (some seen).
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1991
ISBN: 1-879373-04-1
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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