The girl next door tells all. And guess what? She doesn't have a shred of dirt on anyone, including Walt Disney, Dick Clark, Fabian, Paul Anka, or even Cubbie. What else would one expect from Annette Funicello but an overly nostalgic portrait of the decade that gave rise to Disneyland, TV shows like The Mickey Mouse Club, rock 'n' roll, and teen idols? The happy story of Annette's youth in Los Angeles, Disney's discovery of her, her emergence as the biggest Mouseketeer of all, her subsequent television, movie, and recording careers, her two marriages (the second blissful, the first not that bad), her lovely children, and her heroic fight against multiple sclerosis are enough to keep anyone away from the sugar bowl for life. At the same time, Funicello's honesty and sincerity keep the whole thing from seeming untrue, no matter how much some sections beg for her to show Walt Disney in a single crabby moment, Dick Clark flying off the handle at the Drifters, or Fabian being all hands on a date with her. And she leaves to the imagination what proposed movie storylines like ``Annette the Doper, Annette the Hooker, Annette the Drunk'' might have been like. Other than her struggle with MS, though, the worst moment is Paul Anka saying something unkind to her on the telephone. But Annette (with Romanowski, who co-authored Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme) manages to avoid being precious. In fact, her account of being among the first visitors to Disneyland and a barrage of information about performing with people like Frankie Avalon make for some quite illuminating sections. And she even admits to smoking and a little drinking. By the end, Funicello is able to look back without taking any of it, especially albums like Italianette and Hawaiianette, too seriously. (Doubleday Book Club selection)
Pub Date: May 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-7868-6020-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
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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