A fluffy diversion for celebrity-obsessed readers.
A tale of Kardashian Inc.
If John Oliver devoted a show to the famous family, it might share a bit of the snark and incredulity of this report from Oppenheimer (RFK, Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream, 2015, etc.), a prolific author of unauthorized biographies. Readers looking for gossip about the Kardashians’ present lives may be left wanting, but for lovers of 1980s prime-time drama, the author delivers with the origin story of the infamous crew. Anyone who has wondered how this “dysfunctional family with little to no discernable talent besides self-promotion” became a cultural phenomenon will enjoy Oppenheimer’s take. The author is clearly one of the unconverted, and the book feels like a companion volume to Kris Jenner’s 2011 memoir, an effort to annotate and correct the matriarch's own embellished account. He fills in the gaps and calls out Kris’ version as we learn about the doomed first husband, Robert Kardashian, second husband, (formerly) Bruce Jenner, as well as Kris’ climb to the top of Beverly Hills society. Robert, famous for his involvement in the O.J. Simpson trial, gets the kindest treatment here, with a close second going to third-born Khloe Kardashian. She appears as a child whose paternity might be suspect but whose innocence and guilelessness set her apart—at least to Oppenheimer—from the rest of the family. By far the most entertaining aspect, however, is the author’s blatant incredulousness at the history Kris wrote herself. He’s not buying it, quoting her memoir with eyes clearly rolled, featuring such caveats as “she actually avowed” and “suggesting…that she possessed a religious leaning.” The book concludes with an overview of the current clan’s net worth and doings as well as a chilling prediction of what’s next for the ever ambitious Kris Kardashian Jenner: a run for the White House and the ultimate ratings grab.
A fluffy diversion for celebrity-obsessed readers.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08714-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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