Hurst’s reputation, though, has now been ably resurrected by a devoted albeit not uncritical friend and student. He couldn’t...
Memoir of a friendship with a gay, Irish, octogenarian filmmaker.
In the 1970s, Robbins (Test of Courage, 2000, etc.) was a scrappy free-lance journalist, deep in debt, barely able to pay his rent, who was then introduced to Brian Desmond Hurst, a leading Irish filmmaker who wanted to cap his career by making a movie about the events leading up to the birth of Jesus. “Larry Oliver” had already agreed to participate in the project. Robbins at first wanted to back off—Hurst seemed a little weird, and Robbins had never read, let alone written, a screenplay. But Hurst offered a whopping salary, and Robbins signed on. Robbins quickly figured out that Hurst had his own financial woes; he was often unable to find the cash either to pay the milkman or cover his bar tab. Even when friends and associates offered to back the movie, some psychological block prevented Hurst from moving forward. So the film was never made. Still, Robbins and Hurst traveled, and drank, and occasionally wrote. Robbins began working with his eccentric friend on his memoirs, another project that never saw the light of day. But along the way, Hurst included Robbins in a number of adventures, including friendship with (and theft from) a Russian baroness and spy. Robbins’s droll account (winner of the Saga Award for Wit, given previously to Alexander McCall Smith) also offers a glimpse into the gay subculture of pre–Stonewall England—Hurst was sometimes discriminated against by movie execs who didn’t want to work with a “bugger.” He died in 1986 and, despite a career that had included making Malta Story and Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was rapidly forgotten. The filmmaker, says Robbins, “outlived his reputation”—when he died, he hadn’t made a film in two decades.
Hurst’s reputation, though, has now been ably resurrected by a devoted albeit not uncritical friend and student. He couldn’t have wished for a finer tribute.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-709-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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