This first biography of Barbara Stanwyck since her death in 1990 is scrupulously researched and fair, if a bit stilted. Stanwyck had a well-deserved reputation as an actor's actor, a consummate professional who submerged herself in her work—a star, but never a prima donna. That reputation was wrought at great emotional cost, as Madsen (Chanel, 1990, etc.) reports. Orphaned as a young child, Stanwyck bounced among a variety of relatives and foster homes. She grew up yearning for security but also for a job in show business. A chorus girl at 15, she experienced the proverbial meteoric rise to stardom, enjoying success on Broadway before moving west to try her hand at film. At the center of her adult life, though, were two tumultuous and unhappy marriages: The first, to Frank Fay, one-time king of vaudeville, was wrecked by his drinking and jealousy of her successful career (serving as a model for the first version of A Star Is Born); the second, to Robert Taylor, was equally unsuccessful, perhaps because Taylor was gay. She also proved a terrible failure as a mother to her adopted son, Dion. Stanwyck found refuge from personal unhappiness in acting, and she left behind a body of work that is among the most distinguished of any American actress of the studio era, including Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, and Frank Capra's Meet John Doe. Madsen is appropriately reticent in his speculations on Stanwyck's private life, which she guarded almost obsessively, and astute in his assessment of her work. He is somewhat too apologetic for the unsavory role she and Taylor played in the Communist witch hunts of the '40s and '50s. Unfortunately, as her career winds down, the book does too. A comprehensive and intelligently balanced look at a great actress and star, marred by rather ordinary writing. (32 pages of photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017997-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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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