An engrossing, important forgotten chapter in the history of Hollywood and America’s premiere political dynasty.
Beauchamp (Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood, 1998, etc.) uncovers the largely untold story of the Kennedy patriarch’s adventures in the early days of Hollywood.
Kennedy demonstrated preternatural business instincts, ambition and self-promotional flair in his hometown of Boston, winning fame as “America’s youngest bank president” by the age 25 before being seduced by the spectacular profits to be made in the movie business. Employing his enormous personal charm, financial acumen and public-relations savvy, he quickly moved to the head of three movie studios and began amassing a personal fortune that would help establish him as one of the richest men in the country. Beauchamp’s exhaustive research details Kennedy’s every stock manipulation and cost-cutting measure, but the meat of the story is in the tyro’s ruthlessness and single-minded pursuit of the bottom line. This approach led to, among other things, the death of vaudeville, as Kennedy’s purchase of the K-A-O theater chain left that medium’s performers without a venue for their art; the ruined career of cowboy star and Kennedy friend Fred Thomson, who represented competition for Kennedy’s new hire Tom Mix; and the spectacular career flameout of Gloria Swanson, superstar and Kennedy paramour. The section dealing with Swanson’s epic, uncompleted fiasco Queen Kelly, hemorrhaging money as out-of-control director Erich von Stroheim descended into autocratic perversity, is a riveting account of filmmaking in the nascent sound era. It also provides a welcome bit of color in a narrative that, owing to Kennedy’s relative lack of interest in the creative side of the business, tends toward a dryness in its dogged reportage of wheeling and dealing. Beauchamp doesn’t attempt a psychological investigation of Kennedy; he appears simply as a predatory animal, a grinning shark instinctively improving his position without sentiment for those suffering in his wake.
An engrossing, important forgotten chapter in the history of Hollywood and America’s premiere political dynasty.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4000-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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