Pumps a lot of bilge overboard. (13 b&w illustrations)
Astute scrutiny of “the perilous and fascinating lines between fact and fiction, between desire and contempt, between knowledge and doubt,” as demonstrated in critical and biographical treatments of the iconic sex goddess.
Monroe is a brutally oversold image, writes Churchwell (Literature and Culture/Univ. of East Anglia), “an icon of desirability and a stereotype of pathological femininity.” On the one hand, Monroe is a myth, relecting and sanctioning our cultural values; on the other, as Churchwell makes clear, her symbolic relationship to femininity, sexuality, Hollywood, and celebrity has become what the author calls a dead metaphor, “a metaphor that has lost its figurative power, and gets taken literally.” Churchwell wades into the various biographies, biographical novels, plays, and photo-essay, from Fred Guiles and Barbara Leaming to Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and the truly weird Frank Capell, staunch anticommunist and hater of all things Kennedy. With sparkling clarity, she analyzes how these works feed our notions of spectacle, commodity, and representation. Worst of all, they just don’t get it right: Churchwell, who can be coruscating, dubs one psychological profile “stupid to the point of incomprehensibility.” She’s an author of the if-it-looks-smells-and-tastes-like-an-apple-it-is-an-apple school of thought. Writing about Leaming’s comment that the skin-tight gold lamé Monroe wore in 1952 to an awards ceremony showed that the actress was “hell-bent on self-destruction,” Churchwell dryly adds, “rather than the more obvious goal of self-promotion.” She would like to liberate Monroe from such glib characterizations, especially those that use the name the actress discarded to make sentimental assumptions about her “real” personality. “Marilyn Monroe was a real person,” she writes. “It is Norma Jeane who is the fiction, the cultural figment, the ghost of the real invoked as a death sentence.” Speaking of which, she also stirs up serious dust in examining Monroe’s death. Churchwell claims she’s not out to paint a new portrait, but to understand the genesis and purpose of the stories that swarm around Monroe. Turns out she does quite well on both fronts.
Pumps a lot of bilge overboard. (13 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7818-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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