A concise, thoughtful, and well-researched biography.
A distinguished Dutch biographer’s account of the life of Allene Tew (1872-1955), who rose from middle-class obscurity to become one of America’s first socialites.
Born in Janesville, Wisconsin, but raised in Jamestown, New York, Tew was the only child of a bank clerk with rich relatives. Her free-spirited ways and taste for “pleasure [and] adventure” distinguished Tew from other girls of her time. At 18, she became involved with Tod Hostetter, the son of nouveau riche millionaire parents from Pittsburgh. Tew became pregnant out of wedlock and then married Hostetter, who she later discovered was addicted to gambling. She became a widow for the first time by age 30 and married again two years later, this time to a New York stockbroker named Morton Nichols. During their five-year marriage she earned a reputation as a “fantastic, inexhaustible organizer of…charity benefits.” By 1909, Tew was again independent and a major figure in New York society. She remarried in 1912, this time to a wealthy, self-made engineer named Anson Wood Burchard, whom van der Zijl characterizes as the one man out of the five she married who “genuinely loved her for herself.” Their marriage represented the happiest and saddest times in her life: During the time they were together, Tew lost both her children and her parents before losing Burchard in 1927. She went to Europe, where she scandalized American high society by marrying a German prince named Henrich Reuss, divorcing him, then marrying a Russian count 12 years her junior named Pavel Kotzbue. Now part of the European aristocracy, she helped broker what at first seemed an unlikely marriage between Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and a man of obscure aristocratic origin. Set against the tumultuous history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this biography is certainly entertaining, but it is also a fascinating story about a remarkable woman’s indomitable spirit and will to survive.
A concise, thoughtful, and well-researched biography.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5183-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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