A thorough but often graceless narrative of a life that might better have remained shrouded in mystery. Paris (Louise Brooks, 1989) has classic material to work with. Teenage Greta Gustafson is discovered in Stockholm by director Mauritz Stiller, who tyrannizes her, changes her name, makes her a star, and accompanies her to Hollywood. Stiller's career stalls, and he dies a failure. Meanwhile Garbo becomes the familiar icon that her roles frequently mirrored: the perpetually exhausted, gloomy, misunderstood woman with the mesmerizing face. During the period of her stardom and for the 49 years that followed her inadvertent retirement in 1941, Garbo cultivated her pathological, and paradoxical, loathing of publicity and wariness of strangers. This seems to have served not only as a means of self-protection; it was also wise publicity strategy, for she comes off in the reminiscences of her friends and colleagues as paranoid, incurious, and self-absorbed. Paris tellingly repeats Cecil Beaton's observation that ``if she hadn't been `Garbo,' nobody would've wanted to be around her for ten minutes.'' Paris had access to 100 hours of recorded phone conversations between Garbo and art dealer and confidant Sam Green from the 1970s and '80s that portray Garbo as swamped in her own banality, refusing to speak of her films but always ready to complain about her wrinkles, her diet, and her disgust at being recognized in the street. Paris is particularly skillful when detailing Garbo's abortive attempts at a comeback, but the chronology of his anecdotes is sometimes scrambled, and he offers dubious psychosexual insights in his effort to defend an improbably chaste portrait of her: ``Garbo's own innocence was as real as it appeared onscreen, and it was a quality that had to do with love, not sex.'' The prose is often marred by similarly tortuous analyses. Although it leaves her motivations enigmatic, this will likely be the definitive Garbo biography; unfortunately, the story of her life is far less captivating than her screen legacy. (180 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58020-6
Page Count: 634
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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