A snappy, well-researched account of a trailblazing woman.
Biederman’s (Sismo, 1993, etc.) biography tells the story of an eccentric restaurateur.
From the 1930s to the ’60s, Patricia Murphy started several profitable restaurants in greater New York and Florida. She was, by Biederman’s account, a character; she was exacting, telling her staff to “Avoid flurried manner, even when you must work fast,” and superstitious, often crossing herself in public despite not being religious. She was also given to tall tales; she owned a plane that she falsely claimed to pilot herself. But her unparalleled business sense—evidenced in such moves as opening a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale just before it became a retirement destination—didn’t always guarantee her happiness, and Biederman illuminates her highs and lows with humor and compassion. In her earlier years, Murphy struggled to get by in New York City as a musician before investing her last few dollars in a failing Brooklyn restaurant around the start of the Great Depression. Following her initial success, she’d prove to be an expert at branding, and she advanced in the restaurant business and high society through sheer determination. Biederman’s meticulous research provides intimate details of her subject’s life, noting, for instance, that Murphy, before her success, would “pass up dinner to splurge on a twenty-five-cent bunch of daffodils.” These illustrative flourishes create a vivid narrative, anchored by interviews with Murphy’s friends, family members, and colleagues as well as letters, restaurant documents, and other primary source material. Along the way, the author offers insights into the racial dynamics of Brooklyn’s past restaurant scene, the era’s changing gender politics, and the class tensions that followed Murphy’s rise. Of particular interest is the lifelong feud that she had with her siblings, who broke away from her patronage early on to run a competing restaurant chain. Biederman follows Murphy’s life to its end in 1979,noting how time and circumstance worked together to undermine her empire.
A snappy, well-researched account of a trailblazing woman.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4384-7154-9
Page Count: 268
Publisher: State Univ. of New York Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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