Many empty calories in this airy confection. (16 pages b&w photographs, not seen)
In prose so light that sentences nearly float up from the page, Lovell (A Rage to Live, 1998, etc.) chases the Mitford sisters (Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah) hither and yon, from mansion to prison, from Hitler’s hideaway to the top of the bestseller lists.
Lovell declares that she had originally intended a sort of “frothy biography” but instead found so many conflicts, passions, and personal tragedies that the story darkened. Not really. Although there are indeed numerous family crises and catastrophes (unexpected deaths—one of Jessica’s children, a ten-year-old, was delivering newspapers when he was struck and killed by a bus—infidelities, and financial reversals), the story always rolls merrily along with little trenchant or compelling analysis of the meanings or effects of the events. So much froth remains. Still, the much-chronicled Mitfords remain a family with astonishing histories. Diana and Unity were infatuated with fascism and charmed by Hitler (Lovell does not believe they ended up in the sack). Unity, in fact, was so alarmed when England and Germany went to war that she shot herself in the head, somehow survived, and, in Lovell’s words, “remained childlike for the rest of her life.” (Hitler, ever accommodating, paid all her medical bills and saw that she got safely to Switzerland.) Back in England, Diana, whom the government considered a security threat, sat out three and a half years of the war in prison. Lovell can manage only the obvious: “This was the nadir of Diana’s life.” Jessica—denied an education by her parents (who saw no point in it for young women)—rebelled by becoming a Communist and later emigrated to America, where, after becoming a citizen, she found herself being grilled by the California Un-American Activities Committee. Lovell does not do justice to the Mitfords’ impressive, varied writing careers, often contenting herself with providing the titles and a jacket-flap kind of summary.
Many empty calories in this airy confection. (16 pages b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-01043-0
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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