The curtain at least partly raised on a charmed and haunted life.
A scholar’s debut recounts the life and troubling death of a Gilded Age woman.
In the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., a brooding, bronze figure marks the too-early grave of Marion Hooper “Clover” Adams (1843–1885), known, if at all, to posterity as the wife of a distinguished man and as a suicide. This shrouded, enigmatic Saint-Gaudens masterpiece appears almost to warn off biographers intent on probing the puzzle of Clover’s life. But Dykstra (English/Hope Coll.) proceeds boldly and supplies us with all the recoverable details, even if the mystery remains. A child of privilege in Transcendental Boston, Clover received the best progressive education then available to young women. She came of age during the Civil War, bold, athletic and passionate about art, reading and foreign languages. She charmed the likes of John Hay, Clarence King, Henry James and, of course, her husband, the celebrated professor, editor and historian Henry Adams, the direct descendant of two presidents. (Indeed, both Henrys modeled characters in their novels, at least in part, on her.) Though she confidently presided over a Washington home that sparkled with wit, 13 years into her marriage she swallowed a lethal chemical used in her photography, a three-year-old avocation for which she was beginning to develop a reputation. Why? Dykstra finds shadows in Clover’s seemingly enviable life: the early death of her poet mother (Clover was only five), the suicide of a favorite aunt and the unusual closeness between Clover and her physician father who died only months before she took her own life. Clover’s childlessness and the infatuation of her husband with a pretty, young and unhappily married friend may also have contributed to the overwhelming depression that marked her final months. Relying on letters and photographs, even the placement of pictures in an album, Dykstra teases all this out, occasionally appearing to over-read clues to Clover’s inner life. Is it significant that Clover used one of the tools of her art to kill herself, or was potassium cyanide merely the death-dealing agent closest to hand?
The curtain at least partly raised on a charmed and haunted life.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-618-87385-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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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