In its copious details, this lovingly researched portrait of paradise highlights the colorful glitz and too-familiar...
A gleaming social history of the French Riviera in the 1930s, “probably the heyday of the Riviera in its modern sense.”
In her latest, De Courcy (The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married Into the British Aristocracy, 2018, etc.) delivers portraits of a variety of wealthy social circles with the voyeurism of a who’s-who society column. The author portrays American vacationers and European artists, writers, socialites, intellectuals, and public figures, including the Prince of Wales, Wallis Simpson, Jean Cocteau, and Winston Churchill. Coco Chanel—who, according to De Courcy, embodied "France's prestige"—is an alluring if elusive narrative hook. Accounts of her La Pausa home, her lovers, and her stays at the Ritz in Paris punctuate the text, from which she's often absent. The author gives much attention to extramarital affairs, entertaining affectations, and opiate addictions. Quotations from period diaries and letters enliven the narrative, though the overall effect is light and gossipy. De Courcy’s discussion of Chanel's fashion rival, Elsa Schiaparelli, briefly brings the focus back to the titular character. At times, the author fetishizes the bygone glamour that characterized the landscape; Marlene Dietrich, for example, is deemed "the blonde to end all blondes." The rise of the Nazis serves mostly as historical background, and the author offers a reasonable consideration of Chanel's anti-Semitism. Later sections about English expatriates' struggles to flee, deportations, and collaborators in France revisit horrors and miraculous survivals, showing a clear rift between the rich—who experienced minor deprivations yet carried on much as before—and the people who were severely impacted. The unavoidable disjuncture between Chanel's privileged world and the one just outside it leads to a somewhat uneven narrative that will turn off many readers but appeal to those fascinated by the rich and famous.
In its copious details, this lovingly researched portrait of paradise highlights the colorful glitz and too-familiar blindness of the ultrarich.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17707-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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