More surface than substance.
In a gossipy tribute to romance’s irresistible lure, celebrity heiress Vanderbilt coyly recalls the many loves of her life.
Though Vanderbilt offers a psychological explanation for her constant quest for love, it seems more a perfunctory aside than a major revelation in this paean to the susceptible heart. Some of the material has been covered in her other work (A Mother’s Story, 1996, etc.): her happy but too-short marriage to Wyatt Cooper, who fathered her son, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, Wyatt’s early death, and the suicide of their other son Carter. Other sections are part of the public record concerning someone who’s been a headline-maker since childhood in the 1930s, when Aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney went to court claiming that Gloria’s mother was unfit (there were rumors of lesbian attachments) and won, becoming Gloria’s legal guardian. Her absent mother had a lasting impact, admits Vanderbilt: “The love of my life was my mother. My search for love has and always will be to revive the dream of . . . obtaining the perfect mother to love me unerringly and unceasingly.” And it is this search, always energetic, always optimistic, she now chronicles. The list of men in her life is long and often illustrious. They include husbands Pat DeCicco, Leopold Stokowski, and Sidney Lumet; Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, and Roald Dahl (amusingly misspelled throughout as “Raoul”). Except for the one to Cooper, her marriages proved to be mistakes: DeCicco was abusive; Stokowski was cold and self-absorbed; Lumet wanted children and at the time she didn’t, being too busy with her acting career. Her lovers have also often disappointed, but Vanderbilt is still as dewy-eyed about romance as any dreamy adolescent, asserting that there’s always a chance of meeting someone who will transform her life and that dreams often do come true. They certainly have for Vanderbilt, more often than not.
More surface than substance.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6480-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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