Capable rendition of an elaborate family drama.
British author Stuart debuts with a saga of transatlantic maneuvers worthy of Henry James or Edith Wharton.
Alva Smith bolstered the flagging fortunes of her Southern, formerly slave-owning family in 1875 by marrying William K. Vanderbilt, son of the fabulously wealthy but not socially acceptable Commodore. The Vanderbilts had made progress in getting into Mrs. Astor’s good graces when William’s philandering prompted a scandalous divorce in 1895. There was no way daughter Consuelo could be allowed to enjoy true love with a respectable New Englander; Alva steered her into the arms of the Duke of Marlborough. A contemporary newspaper reported that the Vanderbilts paid $10,000,000 in order to join their family to the Marlborough line, and the duke certainly needed the cash: The same paper reported that he earned the 1895 equivalent of $40,000, but his palace at Blenheim cost $370,000 to maintain. Consuelo was none too pleased with the arrangement, in which she had no say; small wonder that she kept her groom waiting at the altar while she wept in the arms of her father, who had no choice but to persuade her to get it over with. Consuelo did, and Alva was soon reaping the benefits due the mother of the Duchess of Marlborough. Good thing, for she needed points to reenter society after her divorce. Declaring that she would never again be financially dependent on a man (save for alimony, of course), Alva later became a strong advocate of women’s rights—some said in penance for what she had done to Consuelo, separated from the duke in 1906 but not divorced until 1921, when she quickly remarried and found happiness among the nobility of France.
Capable rendition of an elaborate family drama.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-621418-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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
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