Amid the fluff and the flutter are some true passion and pain.
The second and final volume of the celebrated actress’s memoir charts her beginnings as an actress and director, her emotional gains and losses, and the births and deaths that affected her.
In her first volume (A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York, 2013), Huston focused on her childhood and her emergence as a fashion model while growing up the daughter of John Huston, the legendary director and actor. That volume had an airy superficiality that continues here, as well. The author includes myriad details about the parties she attended, the designer fashions she wore, the celebrities she hung with (Robert Duvall and Bill Murray) and the colleagues she liked (Drew Barrymore, John Cusack). This can become eye-glazing, but Huston does provide some remarkable passages. She tells about her tempestuous relationship with Ryan O’Neal (who physically abused her), her long on-and-off-and–on-again affair with Jack Nicholson (who could not, it seems, manage fidelity—though Huston also confesses to a number of her own transgressions). She fell in love with—and married—sculptor Robert Graham; the author pauses occasionally to tell us about some of his notable works. She also talks about many of her film roles, including her Oscar-winning performance (supporting actress) in Prizzi’s Honor, starring Nicholson and directed by her father. She shares some anecdotes about the casts and crews she worked with (sometimes—as in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou—she emerged with hurt feelings). But the most powerful segments concern the decline and death of her father—and, later, of her husband. Here, Huston stares directly into life’s horrors and does not blink. There’s a brief passage, as well, about her tangential involvement in Roman Polanski’s 1977 legal troubles.
Amid the fluff and the flutter are some true passion and pain.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476760346
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
