Just to be alive is a grand thing," and Agatha Miller Christie Mallowan was alive for 85 years, the first 75 of which are recalled in this candid (to a point), devourable (utterly), and cheering autobiography—a memory book so buoyantly free of either artistic pretense or commercial imperative that the reading becomes, like the writing, "an indulgence." With the first glimpse of Hercule Poirot not appearing till halfway along, the emphasis is on childhood—perhaps the last record of a Victorian childhood that we'll have and certainly one of the rosiest. Christmas Dinners, boiled sweets, bathing machines, the thrill of fruit-patterned dessert plates, proper coconut shies, hoops, buttercups, and cream—Christie draws you in to the flush of remembering as she revels in the "art of leisure," an art crystallized in her Torquay home until Father's health and American income gave way simultaneously. Then the "art of flirting," practiced in colonial Cairo (cheaper there), where the tall girl with the full dance programme was returned to her mother with: "She dances beautifully. You had better teach her to talk now." Abandoning a career as either a pianist (too nervous) or singer (too weakvoiced), Agatha eagerly accepted her fifth proposal—subaltern Archie Christie—and plunged into V.A.D. work—"human towel rail," dispenser of Bip's paste and poisons—when Archie went to war. With Armistice: motherhood, flathunting, nanny-hunting. . . and a book called The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written on a dare (sister Madge was the talented one, Agatha "the slow one) and resulting in a first-year profit of 25 pounds. "I was a married woman, that was my status, and that was my occupation," and nothing changed that—not even landslides of royalties or the shock of her "ruthless" husband's demand for divorce. Christie omits the amnesia disappearance sensation of 1928 (making her "revulsion against the press" seem sudden and unwarranted), moving briskly on to a second wind—as plucky solo traveler in "Mem-Sahib Land," where archaeologist Max Mallowan (thirteen years younger) wooed her with mild-mannered ardor. Whether musing on her "unsatisfactory" brother ("He would certainly have been all right if he had been born Ludwig II of Bavaria") or out on a dig or decorating houses or pondering capital punishment, Dame Agatha is eager to smile, advise, draw morals, see both sides, and hope for the best. And the many fans who've hoped for the best from this last legacy will not be disappointed: they, along with readers who've never cared for whodunits, will find this year's Christie for Christmas an irresistible forget-me-not from a "tradesman in a good honest trade" who made the most of her talent and her time.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1977
ISBN: 0007314663
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1977
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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