Well-wrought life of the woman who was not only—in the words of a New York Times editorial published on the occasion of her death, in 1948 at age 73—``the spirit that held [the Rockefellers] together'' but whose role in the handling of the family wealth was ``a fortunate thing for society, for this country, and for the world.'' Kert (The Hemingway Women, 1983), despite all her exhaustive research, happily lets her subject retain all of her formidable vitality and independence—characteristics that her husband, the psychologically repressed and romantic loner John D. Rockefeller, Jr., both admired and occasionally sought to curtail. Born in Providence into the distinguished Aldrich family, Abby grew up in a household dominated by her father's career as a US senator. Part of each year was spent in Washington, where Abby often acted as hostess when her ailing mother was indisposed. The Aldriches were lively, outgoing, and irreverent; the Rockefellers pious, reserved, and cautious, especially John, who fell in love with Abby while a student at Brown. These differences irrevocably shaped the marriage: While John adored Abby, always sought her counsel, and supported her involvement in so many issues—though he only reluctantly accepted her role as founder of the Museum of Modern Art—he resented the demands that their children and society made on her. Abby, a remarkably intuitive and sensitive woman, learned how to handle John's resentment, though at some personal cost. Kert deals not only with the couple's marriage—which was, in spite of some strains, a lifelong love affair—and the six Rockefeller children, but also with Abby's generous contributions to art, education, and politics, as well with as her role in creating Rockefeller Center and Colonial Williamsburg. A splendidly intelligent, very readable portrait of a woman who was as wise in the rearing of her family as in the spending of her great wealth. (Forty b&w photos—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-56975-X
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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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