A wonderful story of a woman who managed to achieve independence and leave her mark in a world not quite ready for her.
Biography of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (1875–1879), who fought against the conventions of her time in “a country that lauded self-interest and self-fulfillment for its men but confinement and sacrifice for their wives.”
Berkin (History/Baruch Coll.; Civil War Wives, 2009, etc.) tells the story of a strong woman who succeeded in spite of herself. The young Baltimore beauty was not only intelligent, but also blessed with a quick wit. She was a good friend of Dolley Madison, who introduced her to the best of Washington society. Brash and dressed in the newest shockingly bare styles out of France without a thought to opinion, she found that Jérome Bonaparte was just what she was looking for. The youngest brother of Napoleon, he did not enjoy the navy and left his post in the Caribbean to see America. Jérome and Elizabeth fell madly in love; after a lengthy fight with her father, the couple married in late 1803. Napoleon was livid and ordered his brother home to France—without that American girl. Elizabeth was banned from entering any port in Europe. Jérome finally succumbed to his brother’s demand, and his return to France in 1805 was the end of the marriage. After Napoleon annulled the marriage, she strove for her son’s legitimacy, first with the emperor himself and eventually with Napoleon III and finally in the courts of France, all to no avail. This story would be that of just another headstrong girl who married badly if it weren’t for her fierce independence. She went to Europe seeking intellectual freedom and an identity, carefully budgeted her scant funds, invested wisely and became one of America’s first self-made women.
A wonderful story of a woman who managed to achieve independence and leave her mark in a world not quite ready for her.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-59278-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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