A valuable retelling of a provocative life.
Insightful biography of renowned muckraking journalist Jessica Mitford (1917–1996).
Born into a life of British aristocracy, at age 12 Mitford wrote a letter to a London bank requesting to open a “Running Away Account.” Her action, even at such a young age, was emblematic of the life she would lead—that of an outsider, an activist and a hot-blooded liberal from a family with fascist leanings. Brody (Creative Writing/Univ. of Redlands; Red Star Sister: Between Madness and Utopia, 2000) gives full access to Mitford's story, from her first marriage to Winston Churchill's nephew, Esmond Romilly, to her migration from the comforts of England to the exploding social scene of New York City in the 1940s. The narrative accelerates as Mitford struggles to find solid footing in a foreign land, and the World War II backdrop intensifies after Mitford's husband is discovered missing in action and presumed dead somewhere in the North Sea. After Romilly's death, Mitford's slide to the political left continued upon marrying Civil Rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, who encouraged his wife’s passion for activist reporting. Mitford witnessed firsthand the Freedom Riders' beatings in Birmingham, as well as other violent events during the civil-rights movement. Throughout her life, she courted danger while still managing to brush shoulders with royalty. She held chats with William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, while across the sea, her family dined with Hitler. “Had tea with Hitler,” her mother reported. “He is very agreeable and has surprisingly good manners.” The political differences between Mitford and her family were exacerbated by Joseph McCarthy's HUAC trials, which called upon Mitford and her husband to testify, an indignity that would only further solidify her role as a resilient muckraker long into the future.
A valuable retelling of a provocative life.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-453-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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