Yet another JFK paramour! Is there no mercy? This is a lover with a difference, however, a woman whom Kennedy first wooed before he was president and even before he was married (though he was engaged) to Jackie. The author was a lissome, 21-year-old, upper-class Swede on vacation at the French Riviera when she had a chance encounter with then Senator Kennedy. They dined and danced and sat on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, where he confessed that he was to be married the next week but added, ``if I had met you one week before . . . I would have cancelled the whole thing.'' As we know, he did not cancel, but a half-year later was writing to Gunilla that he would be returning to Europe and would like to meet. The rendezvous was in Sweden and according to von Post, they fell into bed where his ``tenderness was a revelation.'' The romance went on for another few years, mostly long-distance, says von Post, while Kennedy struggled with his father's dominance and his own ambition. Father Joseph and the prospect of the presidency won, although JFK suggested at one point that Gunilla establish herself in New York City's Carlyle Hotel, later infamous as a presidential playground. Gunilla wisely refused, going on to marry a Swedish notable, bear children, be tragically widowed, remarry, divorce, and lose a child through leukemia. She identified with Jacqueline's similar experiences. But she kept the letters from and the memories of the riveting young Jack Kennedy and is sharing them with us now (aided by Johnes, the author of two biographies). A good portion of this book is also devoted to establishing her credentials as a ``good girl,'' one of JFK's true loves. A sweet but unconvincing effort to depict JFK as an only somewhat unwilling victim of his father's dreams. (8 pages b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1997
ISBN: 0-609-60095-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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