As a blacklisted screenwriter, Bernard Gordon was never completely silenced, but it is still thrilling to hear him have his say in a memoir of Hollywood’s darkest era. Was Gordon out to sabotage the country by infiltrating Hollywood and surreptitiously inserting Marxist propaganda into America’s films? Was he part of a Communist cabal to abolish capitalism? No, he was an up-and-coming young Jewish man who was trying to make ends meet and live according to his principles. He was a left-leaning Democratic Socialist who during the early days of WWII became a member of the Communist Party because they were the ones fighting Hitler. His one clear attempt at propaganda, which he writes about candidly, amounts to no such thing. He tried to put black characters into his scripts so that he could get some black actors work when they were shunned by a motion picture industry and country still engaged in strict segregation. Gordon became a Hollywood screenwriter by accident, he reports, but he is such a gifted storyteller that it’s no surprise that he ended up as one. His credits include The Lawless Breed, The Thin Red Line, Battle of the Bulge, Pancho Villa, and Hellcats of the Navy, the only film starring both Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis—which he now heartily regrets making, considering Reagan’s earlier efforts in favor of the blacklist. He spent most of his career working in Europe because he couldn’t get work in America under his own name, and that is where the adventure part of the story comes in. He traveled all over the continent, waiting for picture deals to come through, wondering if the money would really be there, never sure that he had any talent for what he was being paid to do. Gordon’s story is a testament to the everlasting vitality of creativity in the face of scare tactics and coercion. (33 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-292-72827-1
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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