A sort of how-I-struggled-onto-the-stage story, told with appealing detail and self-deprecation.
A celebrated contemporary playwright and screenwriter rehearses his boyhood, early career, and the stumbles and bumbles of his personal life.
Hare, born in 1947 into a modest English seaside life (his father was an often absent merchant seaman), writes early about the boyhood thrill he felt at getting lost. The thrill seems to have lingered. He would later lose himself in self-doubt, in an extramarital affair with actress Kate Nelligan (an affair that rose, then sank, then rose and sank again), and in attempts to understand the enduring effects his parents’ behavior had on him. Readers who know Hare’s unique stage works will be surprised by the conventional and sturdily chronological nature of his memoir. He begins in boyhood and marches us through his school experiences (he did well and ended up at Cambridge) and his reading habits, declaring proudly, “Even as a child, J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll meant nothing to me, and they mean less today….I have been Hobbit-hating from Day One.” He describes as “savage” the social life at prep school and admits he was “a nasty little boy.” Most of his text, though, deals with his early experiences in the theater. He began doing puppet shows, spent some time selling vacuum cleaners door to door (unsuccessfully), and then gave acting a go but soon realized his theatrical talents lay elsewhere. He segued into directing, then writing, and more or less lucked into a position at the Royal Court Theatre, a position that would lead to many projects for him—successes and failures of all sorts. Hare does display a refreshing candor about his screw-ups and even his cruelties, personally and professionally. He also lets fly with some occasional haymakers at theater critics, many of whom he patently considers clueless. Some famous names parade across his proscenium, as well, including Edward Fox, Tom Wilkinson, Tom Stoppard, Peter Hall, and Helen Mirren.
A sort of how-I-struggled-onto-the-stage story, told with appealing detail and self-deprecation.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24918-7
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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