Usually fatuous, spiteful, and superficial, here and there piquant or instructive. (41 b&w photos throughout)
A quintessential quidnunc chronicles his continent-hopping capers as photographer to the stars and the royals, as a designer of sets for Hollywood and Broadway, and as a fox in Celebrity’s henhouse.
Beaton (The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as He Wrote Them, 1970–1980, 2003) was a skilled, imaginative artist—a photographer whose works were featured at the National Portrait Gallery, a designer whose clothing and sets enlivened My Fair Lady and Coco, a painter who sought ever to improve. But a writer? He rarely probes below epidermal depths, and any of his stunning photographs reproduced here are truly worth more than a thousand of his words. By far the best portions here deal with his involvement with the Broadway production of Coco in 1969, featuring a Katherine Hepburn he initially admires but grows to fear. Beaton provides an insider’s running commentary on the backstage bickering about colors and designs and sets and scenes—and, with surprising equanimity, writes about the negative reviews of the show, especially Clive Barnes’s shots at the very portions of the production for which Beaton was responsible. Also affecting are Beaton’s periodic laments about the break-up of his relationship with Kin, a San Francisco professor, who decides he wants to go back to California (after living with Beaton), where, Beaton complains, he fails to write with sufficient frequency. Beaton was at times a treacherous friend: he accepted the hospitality of aristocrats, plutocrats, and celebrities’ children—or socialized elsewhere with them—then returned to his quarters and waxed vicious in his diary. Noël Coward was “a fat old turtle”; Mick Jagger’s face was “a white, podgy, shapeless mess”; Vanessa Redgrave could look “quite hideous.” And so on. He writes respectfully, though, about Marianne Moore, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jon Voight, and a few others. Vickers, leaving nothing to chance, explains in his myriad footnotes who Richard Nixon and Queen Victoria were.
Usually fatuous, spiteful, and superficial, here and there piquant or instructive. (41 b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4297-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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