However bold, West’s quotes don’t fully define her iconic life, and Chandler does very little to fill in what’s missing.
A vacuous biography of the little chickadee.
Asked why she donated her used limousines to nuns, West said, “I just can’t stand seeing a nun waiting for a bus.” The is one of a handful of quotes available in this latest from celebrity biographer Chandler (Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography, 2008, etc.). Unfortunately, the author offers little perspective on the life of the legendary writer, performer and personality. As in her other “personal biographies,” Chandler offers transcriptions of her long interview sessions with the likes of Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock and others. The memories of a deep bond West shared with her mother are touching, and Chandler offers piquant details of time served in a New York City jail when authorities deemed one of West’s plays obscene. But the author should have heeded George Cukor’s observation that West “always had what you might call a selective memory” and challenged some of the actress’s sometimes dubious assertions. The star said, for example, that her films rescued Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy at the onset of the Great Depression. Chandler lets West’s claim go unchecked, without going over the studio’s balance sheets for other films, or considering how the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, to say nothing of their directors and writers, also kept Paramount in the black. Chandler also provides scant insight into West’s appeal to the public—or her lack of appeal after the 1930s. The author’s flat plot summaries of West’s films and plays, wedged between West’s eventually tiresome, narcissistic musings, make no distinction between the comic brilliance of She Done Him Wrong and the grotesque excesses of Myra Breckinridge, arguably one of the worst films ever made. She shared her last years with a bodybuilder who rationed the chocolates she ate after dinner, a moment in a sad demise Chandler lets pass without comment.
However bold, West’s quotes don’t fully define her iconic life, and Chandler does very little to fill in what’s missing.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7909-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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