Lovell packs in as many celebrities as possible, which makes for an entertaining book but not one likely to end up on a...
Lovell (The Churchills: In Love and War, 2011, etc.) turns her attention to the French Riviera between the wars and into the 1960s.
Like the author’s tale of the Mitford family, this is a gossipy book with courtesans and famous politicians hopping from château to château and bed to bed. Though British wealth ruled the 1920s and ’30s, after World War II, the Americans and Europeans took over. Within this glamorous milieu, one always needed money, but breeding, talent, beauty, sociability, and a good sense of humor were also very important. The author anchors the story with a biography of American actress and businesswoman Maxine Elliott (1868-1940), a grande dame of the scene. Though she is relatively unknown today, Elliott amassed a fortune—with helpful advice from J.P. Morgan—and built the much-visited villa the Château de l’Horizon in 1932. Invitations to her events were always highly sought-after, and she gave parties from morning to night. Winston Churchill, in his wilderness years, found sanctuary with her in his own suite of rooms to accommodate his staff. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, at loose ends after WWII, depended on Elliott for privacy and a safe haven. The list of guests is endless and includes Daisy Fellowes, Doris Castlerosse, and Lady Diana Cooper, ladies well-versed in enjoying the moment. The postwar years without Elliott made it a sunny place for shady people, until it was sold to Aly Khan, whose fascinating best friends were Elsie de Wolfe and the incomparable Elsa Maxwell. It was Maxwell who introduced Khan to Rita Hayworth, which led to the wedding of the century. As the rich and famous built larger and flashier homes along the Riviera, the days of Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward gave way to visits by the Kennedy family, Onassis family, and other high-profile guests.
Lovell packs in as many celebrities as possible, which makes for an entertaining book but not one likely to end up on a reference shelf.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-515-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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