Entertaining and thoughtful moments exchanged between a mother and son who have spent much of their lives in the spotlight.
A famous mother and famous son bond through email exchanges.
When Vanderbilt reached her 90s, her son, CNN journalist Cooper, realized there might not be many years left to interact, so they began to correspond via email, carrying out a conversation on the important things that have mattered in both their lives. Over the course of the following year, the two delved deeply into Vanderbilt’s childhood. She discusses the loss and effects she felt from never having known her father, who died when she was very young, the trauma she experienced during the well-publicized custody trial she endured at age 10, and the closeness she felt toward her governess rather than toward her biological mother. Vanderbilt writes with frankness about her impulsive love affairs and subsequent marriages to men she barely knew but who were older and filled the emptiness that only now she realizes was created by the lack of a father in her life. Cooper also explores some of his own issues during these mother-son conversations. He discusses his own anxieties and sense of loss when his father died and his trepidation at coming out as gay to Vanderbilt. The combination of questions asked and answered brings forth much more of Vanderbilt’s hidden life than that of Cooper, allowing readers insight into a woman whose name is known and who has shared much of her life through various memoirs. The perspective of old age and the distance from past events has allowed her to unveil these new aspects to her son and now to readers. The takeaway for mother and son is a closeness they didn’t have before, and their interchanges might prompt readers to do the same with their own elderly parents, perhaps with the same outcome.
Entertaining and thoughtful moments exchanged between a mother and son who have spent much of their lives in the spotlight.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-245494-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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