Faber's latest entry in its excellent film book series is the autobiography of one of Hollywood's most underrated filmmakers. De Toth is probably best known to nonfilm buffs as the one- eyed man who directed one of the first 3-D motion pictures, House of Wax (1953). In reality, that trifle is one of his lesser efforts. De Toth's filmography includes some of the best examples of action genre films the studio system has to offer: dark, brooding westerns like Ramrod and Springfield Rifle, chilling film noir like Pitfall, and the bleakest of WW II anti-heroic films, Play Dirty. None of which could have prepared readers for this delightful, somewhat rambling, but charming autobiography. It is telling that de Toth is halfway through this long book before he even gets to Hollywood; he is more interested in recounting the bizarre happenstances of his youth, and how he at long last stumbled into movies, than in boring readers with the obligatory ``and-then-I-made'' anecdote. Even his Hollywood tales tend to focus more on strange occurrences off the set than on filmmaking. It comes as no surprise that de Toth remembers Howard Hughes more as an aviator than as a producer. From his youthful encounter with the great Hungarian playwright Ferenc Moln†r through his fond recollections of the brothers Korda to a memorable several weeks on shipboard with England's Prince Charles, de Toth has known some incredible people; the best stories in the book involve noncelebrities, a memorable parade of hustlers, whores, and madams. He is a surprisingly graceful writer, witty and flamboyant, as befits a former race-car driver, aviator, and polo player with seven wives, numerous dogs, a twice-broken neck, and one eye. Although it suffers a bit from longueurs in the last hundred pages and is unforthcoming about de Toth's actual filmmaking experiences, Fragments is an entertaining and unexpected look at an unconventional life.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-571-17222-9
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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