Engrossing, lucid presentation of a uniquely complicated and productive life.
The tumultuous story of a director whose signature movies—dark, bleakly funny, shot through with perversity and paranoia—reflect the sensibility of an artist shaped by circumstances more harrowing, unpredictable and absurd than any Hollywood melodrama.
Roman Polanski’s troubles began in 1939, when the Nazis invaded his native Poland. The family was confined to Krakow’s Jewish ghetto, and in 1943 his parents were sent to concentration camps, leaving their ten-year-old son to fend for himself. (After the war, reunited with his father, he learned that his pregnant mother had been gassed at Auschwitz.) Cunning and possessed of a ferocious drive, Polanski eventually attended film school in Lodz, where he quickly became the star pupil and developed a reputation for lavish spending, partying and prodigious sexual conquests. In slyly playful prose, Sandford (McCartney, 2007, etc.) limns the young artist as a mercurial changeling, alternately arrogant, tender, hilarious, boorish and charming, always striving for (and coming thrillingly close to) technical perfection in his cinematic technique. After he emigrated to America, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown helped define a new era in movies and cemented their director’s status as one of the greats. Polanski’s personal life remained gothic: In 1969 his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was horrifically murdered by the Manson Family; eight years later, the director pled guilty to the charge of “unlawful intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl, fled the country before sentencing and has lived in Europe since. Sandford admirably extracts all of the salient information from the maelstrom of controversy and urban myth surrounding Polanski’s often lurid personal history, neither damning nor exonerating him. When he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2002 for his Holocaust drama The Pianist (obviously, he could not attend), the driven, 69-year-old director was in Paris, preparing his next film.
Engrossing, lucid presentation of a uniquely complicated and productive life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-230-60778-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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