A fan letter in the form of a biography.
A celebratory biography of the director “whose public persona is instantly and eternally assumed to be his real personality.”
In an email quoted in its entirety, Woody Allen advised Evanier (All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett, 2011, etc.) against writing this book. “All the facts about my life have been written about and rewritten about,” Allen said, “and my work has been dissected in books and articles all over the world for years.” He was concerned, as well, that the author’s assessments of his movies were “wrong-headed appraisals and would not add anything to the cultural landscape.” Unfortunately, Evanier persisted, and he has produced a bloated, repetitious, overly rapturous biography filled with plot summaries, reviews, and excerpts from Allen’s many interviews and profiles. His interviewees include a few of Allen’s childhood friends; colleagues, such as his casting director; his forgiving first wife, Harlene Rosen Allen; a writer who confesses that she is “one of Allen’s most obsessed fans”; critics John Simon and Richard Schickel; and Dick Cavett, whose interview with the author appears in full. “This is not a blow-by-blow or a standard critical biography,” writes the author, but rather an effort to “make Allen known and understood in a deeper way.” To Evanier, Allen “is the most amazing phenomenon in the history of American show business,” greater even than Charlie Chaplin. “His continuity and high rate of productivity are unprecedented,” though some work falls short: “Interiors,” for example, “is practically unwatchable.” Not surprisingly, the author mounts considerable evidence to defend Allen against accusations of sexual impropriety regarding his affair with Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter and sexual abuse of another daughter. Evanier concedes, however, “that Allen appears to feel guiltless about his behavior toward women. He seems to feel no sense of responsibility,” an attitude that does not diminish the author’s adulation.
A fan letter in the form of a biography.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04726-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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