Noted actor Holbrook serves up a charming but unsentimental memoir of his early life.
The author is well known for one-man shows depicting Mark Twain in all his white-suited, cigar-chomping, brilliant finery. It may come as a surprise to some readers that Holbrook was scarcely out of childhood when the role was thrust on him, along with Shakespeare and Wilde and all the other stuff of a traveling theatrical troupe. His childhood was anything but easy. He opens with an incident in a principal’s office that would turn anyone from school, one of many acts of unrestrained evil that pop up from time to time in the narrative—besides, at his next school, he was filled with foreboding at the sight of “massive brick buildings resembling fortresses with openings on the roof for people to shoot at you.” Yet acts of kindness, it seems, came along more often enough that Holbrook did not despair. He reconnected with his mentally ill, absent father, whom he came to understand and forgive; he found encouragement among fellow actors in training, and particularly by an acting teacher in college. Holbrook set his sights low—he was elated when he learned of his first acting job that “they were going to pay me $15 a week”—but he quickly discovered that he excelled at his chosen work, which didn’t necessarily make the school of hard knocks any easier. Without boasting, Holbrook recounts being recognized early on as both a serious worker and a leader—during his Army years, the brass were constantly trying to make him an officer. But mostly his memoir is a matter of living out of a trunk, traveling dusty roads from town to town and enduring bad turns of fate, not least of them the blacklist of the McCarthy era. The events in this book end in 1958—meaning, one hopes, that a sequel will appear in short order.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-28101-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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