The eldest daughter of TV actor/writer/director/producer Michael Landon (Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, etc.) tells her side of the Landon story—and tells her father's as best she can. Wilson is the daughter of Landon's second wife, Marjorie Lynn Noe, and has eight siblings or quasi-siblings. Landon, dying of cancer at 54, expressed his regret to Wilson that he'd not been allowed by her biological father to adopt her—but that she'd always been his daughter anyway. With this book, she returns the favor by protecting and honoring Landon's memory and by showing how he was her dad even though she'd had weekend contact with her biological father during her mother's marriage to Landon—who had his problems. The son of a mentally disturbed woman, he popped pills during his early years on Bonanza and never gave up heavy use of cheap vodka. But friends and others envied his Romeo-and-Juliet tie with Marjorie, an immense lovey-doveyness that would not allow his eyes to leave her. Landon clearly was a marvelous father to all his children, and much of his home life became grist for scripts he wrote and directed for his various series. Wilson's darkest moment came with an auto accident that killed her three fellow passengers and nearly killed her, and that left her with lifelong pain and a dependency on Percodan. Her use of the painkiller got out of hand and she had to enter rehab. Another tough time came when Landon left Marjorie for his young third wife. The kids were hurt, but the younger ones recovered as part of Landon's new and growing family- -although Wilson felt whipped when Landon shrank her inheritance to much less than expected. The high points here are quite moving, especially Landon going on The Tonight Show to fight the tabloids two months before dying. Well done. (Photos—24 pp. b&w—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-79352-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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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