If the current US ambassador to France, Pamela Harriman, had spent as much time on her back as this book suggests, she would never have had the time to do the world-class housekeeping and flower arrangements that allegedly endeared her to her lovers—let alone become an authority on antiques, bring together historic personalities for global policy discussions, or raise millions of dollars for the Democratic party. Time correspondent Ogden (Maggie, 1990, a biography of Margaret Thatcher) was tapped to do the authorized Pam bio but was dumped, he says, when Ambassador Harriman got cold feet. Ogden had already keyed off ``some forty hours of interviews'' with the subject, for which he was not remunerated according to their original agreement. That may or may not have influenced his perspective when he decided to write the story anyway: He seems to view Harriman as a world-class courtesan. Chapters are for the most part named for the men in her life: Randolph (Churchill—first husband); Averell (Harriman—WW II lover and, decades later, third husband); Bill (Paley, CBS head); Ed (Murrow); JFK (misleading—she was friends with his sister); Gianni (Agnelli, Fiat head); Elie (de Rothschild); Leland (Hayward—second husband); Frank (Sinatra- -houseguest, no affair). For the first 16 (of 19) chapters, the author sniffs disapprovingly at her romantic life (more because she apparently let her lovers support her than because she was promiscuous), although he does admit that father-in-law Winston Churchill and his wife loved and protected her (even after her marriage to Randolph ended) as did most of her ex-lovers. Short on formal education but long on listening skills, Harriman trained that talent on a life lived by her own rules. This is fun to read as the names drop, but it offers more titillation than insight into a woman who rode out from a proper Dorset upbringing to adventure, wealth, power—and acknowledged achievement.
Pub Date: May 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-63376-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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