Nothing more to learn about Jackie O.? How about that her mother was a screamer, hit her daughter, and abandoned Jackie and her sister to a nanny while she prowled the New York social scene in search of a husband to replace Jackie's beloved father. Author Davis (Mafia Dynastry, 1993, etc.) was a first cousin on the Bouvier side to the late Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, but by his own admission, he was not an ``intimate.'' What Davis has going for him is family papers rescued and preserved by his mother and many childhood summers shared with Jackie at Lasata, the East Hampton retreat of their Bouvier grandparents. Davis's thesis is that the elegant surroundings and lifestyle at Lasata gave a head start to Jackie's highly developed esthetic and that the escalating warfare between her mother, the former Janet Lee, and her father, ``Black Jack'' Bouvier, led to her ``secretiveness.'' Caught in a tug-of-war between her parents for her affections, according to Davis, after her mother married the wealthy Hugh Auchincloss and her Grandfather Bouvier died leaving Lasata to be sold, Jackie began to pull away from her father. Eventually, on her wedding day, Bouvier was tragically abandoned, waiting in a Newport hotel room while Hugh Auchincloss gave his daughter away. Included are stories of Jackie as Deb of the Year, as Vassar student with football weekends at Yale and Princeton, and as inquiring photographer for the Washington Post. Here also is the text of Jackie's winning Vogue Prix de Paris entry, stories about how she charmed Joe Kennedy, and the fact that her number-one priority in a husband was that he be wealthy. Davis's reminiscences stop with her wedding. For ardent Jackie fans, plenty of photos, from babyhood to wedding day, some not seen before. Although the broad outlines of Jacqueline Bouvier's childhood are familiar, Davis's memories add details that will help readers better understand this most celebrated, most mysterious woman.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1996
ISBN: 0-471-12945-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
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