Richly detailed account of Redgrave’s career, though it’s missing the fireworks that some encounters with the author might...
A freelance critic and author returns with a blend of biography and criticism in his reconstruction of the life of the woman many consider the greatest actress of her time.
Redgrave (born 1937) did not cooperate with Callahan’s (Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, 2012) project, and we witness no encounters between them until the final pages. Instead, the author relies heavily on her filmed appearances (TV and movies—he appears to have seen everything), published reviews of her performances, memoirs of the principals, accounts in periodicals (including the far-left political activities that imperiled her career), and interviews with others who knew and know her. Callahan’s treatment, sturdily chronological, informs us about her parents (Michael, her father, is a major character), her love affairs (Franco Nero and Timothy Dalton are among the most prominent), her beginnings in theater (she played in Saint Joan in high school), the evolution of her philosophy and technique of luminescent acting, and her early films and breakout role as Guinevere in the film of Camelot (1967), a production the author calls the “ruination of a delightful show.” Callahan moves steadily through her work, pausing occasionally to give detailed summaries and analyses of specific productions and her performances. Although he is a great admirer of Redgrave’s work, the author does not hesitate to chide her—as he does for her 2003 stage appearance in Long Day’s Journey into Night. He also pauses for chapters about her loved ones—e.g., about her father and his death or her daughter, Natasha Richardson, and her death in 2009.
Richly detailed account of Redgrave’s career, though it’s missing the fireworks that some encounters with the author might have ignited.Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-557-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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