Informative, although often overwhelming in scope. (16-page b&w photo insert, not seen)
An account of Havana’s internationally renowned nightclub during its 1950s heyday.
Art conservator Lowinger was just a toddler when her parents fled Cuba in the early ’60s. Throughout her childhood, she was haunted by their stories of starry evenings spent in Tropicana’s outdoor cabaret. So when the Los Angeles resident visited Cuba as an adult, saw the glamour of Tropicana for herself, and learned that the performer once known as the “First Lady of Tropicana” now lived in L.A., Lowinger lost no time in visiting the octogenarian Fox. Thus began several years of conversations that comprise the bulk of this text, along with scenes set at the homes of former Tropicana players in New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Cuba. Despite the shared author credit, the story is told in the first person, from Lowinger’s point of view. The best sections portray such quirky nightclub characters as the leprous choreographer whose otherworldly shows sent audience members into trances, a teenaged Czech acrobat who danced cabaret, and former Tropicana owner (and the co-author’s deceased husband) Martín Fox, a gambler and close friend to mafiosi who never left the house without his .38-calibre Smith & Wesson. Too often, though, Lowinger falls into show-biz groupie mentality, boring readers with society-page–style summaries of so-and-so’s mink stole, pearl necklace or terracotta nail polish. The wearer of many of these accoutrements is Fox, a pro-Bush Republican with whom the progressive Lowinger frequently finds herself fighting about politics—also a major preoccupation in corrupt pre-Revolutionary Cuba. The development of the authors’ contentious friendship shares the stage with the Tropicana’s history; Fox’s relationship with housemate Rosa Sanchez provides a third narrative strand that leads to a sweetly romantic ending.
Informative, although often overwhelming in scope. (16-page b&w photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101224-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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