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THE LAST CASTLE

THE EPIC STORY OF LOVE, LOSS, AND AMERICAN ROYALTY IN THE NATION'S LARGEST HOME

One-dimensional characters undermine the potential drama of life within a castle.

The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Vanderbilts.

At the end of the 19th century, the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, was the biggest, grandest, most opulent home in America. Set on 125,000 acres, the 175,000-square-foot mansion contained 250 rooms, 43 bathrooms, 3 kitchens, 65 fireplaces, and a 72-foot-long banquet hall. Eight million bricks cloaked its 750-foot facade, and a massive dining table could seat more than 70 guests. Filled with art and sculpture, the house was the pride and obsession of George Washington Vanderbilt II (1862-1914), grandson of the shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. Biltmore House is the setting for Kiernan’s (The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, 2013, etc.) family history, featuring George and his wife, Edith Dresser. Unfortunately, the house itself emerges as a livelier presence than its inhabitants. George was a mystery even to his best friend, who called him “cold-blooded,” moody, and reticent. He enjoyed napping and reading. “You know I do not for a moment envy the position of GV,” his friend noted. “He is not one speck as happy as I am, and the spending of money gives him absolutely no thrill.” He seemed not interested in women, either, but at the age of 35, “America’s richest bachelor” became engaged to Edith, the well-bred, though not wealthy, daughter of a noted New York family whose ancestors included Manhattan governor Peter Stuyvesant. Kiernan discloses little about their personalities and nothing about their courtship or relationship as husband and wife. She does chronicle their wedding, honeymoon, return to Asheville, and many other travels as well as the declining fortunes that made Biltmore an exceedingly expensive undertaking. Edith engaged in much charity work before and after George’s sudden death. The couple had one child, but the author hardly looks at her relationship with her parents, focusing mostly on the family’s financial woes, which became increasingly dire.

One-dimensional characters undermine the potential drama of life within a castle.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4767-9404-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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