An animated and intelligent biography.
Movie biographer Staggs' (Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life, 2009, etc.) lively account of how a jowly plain Jane from Iowa became the 20th century’s most celebrated “party giver for the rich, the royal, [and] the famous.”
Elsa Maxwell (1883–1963) was once “as famous a name as Martha Stewart or Joan Rivers today.” Born into an upper-middle-class milieu she would later disavow, her social-climbing sensibilities emerged early on. The author traces the origins of Maxwell's desire to be surrounded by the beautiful people of the world to the fact that her family was never asked to attend the high-society functions that had so captivated their daughter. Her life became an exercise in making up for this affront by giving parties “to which no rich people would be invited,” but would still be the talk of the town. Gifted with a silver tongue, musical talent and a knack for being at the right place at the right time, Maxwell began her career by befriending a dazzling array of actors and entertainers, including such luminaries as Enrico Caruso, Cole Porter and Nöel Coward. These individuals in turn helped launch her into circles frequented by socialites, heiresses, politicians and European royalty. By the early 1920s, Maxwell had fulfilled her dream and become a much-in-demand international hostess whose parties were more like "impromptu carnival events" than simple social gatherings. Her peripatetic life eventually took her to Hollywood where, from the mid-1930s on, she wrote screenplays, appeared in several movies and had her own on-again/off-again radio show. What makes Maxwell so compelling a figure isn't just the improbable nature of her achievements, but her personal complexities, which Staggs discusses in depth. A closeted lesbian, she condemned homosexuality despite an almost 50-year partnership with another woman and an unrequited passion for opera legend Maria Callas.
An animated and intelligent biography.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0312699444
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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