A frenetic, inflated outing with one of the world's great filmmakers, who died in 1993 at the age of 73. Except for a brief afterword, Chandler (The Ultimate Seduction, 1984, etc.) seems content to turn the tape recorder on and let Fellini ramble away in his inimitable stream-of- consciousness style. So we are treated to Fellini on dogs (he likes them), astrology (might be something in it), bicycling (a sensible way to get about), and occasionally a choice tidbit about one of his films, such as La Dolce Vita or La Strada. Repetitiousness is just one of the many Fellini-esque excesses indulged in here: epicurean ecstasies on food, unreconstructed ravings on women, and dream after dream after dream. At times it feels like being trapped in a small room with a madman. And yet moments of pure insight, epiphanic understanding of the human condition keep breaking through, like flecks of gold uncovered in the dust. This is also as close an approximation of an autobiography as we'll ever get (and Chandler is to be commended, at least, for imposing a rough kind of chronology and structure onto the material). Fellini superstitiously thought an autobiography would spell the end of his career and hasten his death. He also thought the mundane reality of dates and events paled in comparison with the cherished realm of ``fantasies, dreams, and imagination. That is the real person, naked.'' Like Freud, Fellini was a relentless explorer of the unconscious. He was also unique among major directors for dubbing his movies. For him, it was the face, the gesture, the mien that was important. Actors could say anything as long as the visual reality was right. The proper dialogue could always be dubbed later. If only such a thing were possible here. Instead, we get Fellini in too many of his own words. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-44032-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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