Among several other books about Bergman, including her own autobiography, this one seems a series of outtakes.
A haphazard assemblage of interviews with Bergman and her friends, family and directors.
Liv Ullmann piques curiosity when she recalls shouting matches between Ingrid Bergman and director Ingmar Bergman during filming of the former’s final film, Autumn Sonata. “[P]eople say she was very tough in Hollywood,” Ullmann adds. Little evidence of Ingrid Bergman’s allegedly flinty temperament exists elsewhere in this latest from Chandler (The Girl Who Walked Home Alone, 2006, etc.), part of a series of star biographies based, she reminds readers repeatedly, on her own interviews. Bergman reflects with equanimity on three marriages, film and stage careers in Stockholm, Hollywood and Europe and a tumultuous break from the United States when she left her first husband and daughter, Pia Lindstrom, to pursue an affair, then marriage to Italian film director Roberto Rossellini. A daughter of the second marriage, Isabella Rossellini, speaks adoringly of her mother. Not heard from here is Lindstrom, who once testified she did not love her mother, a fact Chandler doesn’t mention. As for Bergman’s career, Chandler writes straight plot summaries of Bergman’s films and plays, but provides scant critical insight into her acting. Of Bergman’s work in Intermezzo (the film that launched her career), in Anastasia (the film that garnered her an Oscar and that may have softened and reclaimed American audiences indignant over her personal life) and in Hitchcock’s Notorious (a career highpoint), Chandler observes virtually nothing. Profiles of Bergman’s first husband, Peter Lindstrom, apparently as rigid as the forbidding husband in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Robert Capa, the self-destructive photographer with whom Bergman had an affair, lend some interest.
Among several other books about Bergman, including her own autobiography, this one seems a series of outtakes.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9421-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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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