Banality clutches the text tightly, too rarely releasing its wings.
An Oscar-winning actress from a celebrated entertainment family recalls her peripatetic childhood and adolescence, her various awakenings and epiphanies.
The granddaughter of Oscar winner Walter Huston (1949, for The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and daughter of Oscar-winning actor and director John Huston (1949, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, for directing and screenwriting) writes that she “was a lonely child.” However, so many personalities and celebrities swirl through the story that we begin to wonder about loneliness in a crowd. Born in 1951, she soon became a part of her father’s world, though he was often absent, off filming. She adored her mother (John’s fourth wife) but would soon learn that her father’s carnal needs were immense. He would marry a fifth time but also carry on multiple affairs with—it seems—just about any woman who would yield. The earliest sections of Huston’s memoir are the strongest: poignant details about her childhood affections, the men and women who worked on the Irish estate purchased with her father’s film profits (his habitual gambling ever endangered all), the quotidian routines of girlhood. But as time progresses, the memoir sags. Soon, her selection principle seems to be “I remember this, so I’m including it,” and a phone book of names assails readers, challenging both memory and interest. However, there are some amusing anecdotes—e.g., a plane ride with the Monkees, an appearance with an oddly detached Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. The death of her mother (car crash) was obviously traumatizing, as was a longtime affair with photographer Bob Richardson, an affair that veered toward abusive before its end. This first installment—to be followed next year with the second volume—concludes as the author heads to Los Angeles.
Banality clutches the text tightly, too rarely releasing its wings.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5629-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
SEEN & HEARD
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