Flawed but still head-and-shoulders above most film bios, a life of the Italian actor that focuses largely on his art but that soft-peddles the nitty-gritty of everyday life. Dewey wrote the novel Reasonable Doubts (1991). Mastroianni, born in 1924 in a small town 50 miles south of Rome, herein speaks with considerable self-understanding and depth whenever Dewey quotes him from interviews over the decades—quotes that make up about a third of the text. The actor has played leading men in nearly 140 European movies, involving himself in such a variety of roles that Europeans broadly see him as the greatest living actor—and from this rehearsal of Mastroianni's talents, the Europeans may be right. He has consistently, until 1990, refused to play in Hollywood films, in part because the Hollywood scripts sent to him always called for him to be a Latin lover. His one American film, last year's Used People, which allowed him to play with Shirley MacLaine, Jessica Tandy, and Kathy Bates, failed at the box office and his personal reviews in it weren't much better. Dewey follows the hero's passage from early triumphs on the Italian stage through his smaller roles in his first 15 films, then into his hits, Big Deal on Madonna Street, La Dolce Vita, and Divorce, Italian Style, and his friendship with Federico Fellini, whom he ``played'' in Fellini's semiautobiographical 8-´. The actor in no way sees himself as a great lover and admits to experiencing trouble ``down there'' (a passing impotence). Even so, his 40-year marriage to Flora Carabella has survived affairs with Faye Dunaway, Catherine Deneuve (with whom he has a daughter), and others in his search for the ideal woman—who usually turns out to be the worst. Intermittent stops for Dewey's head-stuff on Mastroianni's art or character sometimes inspire but can also bog down. Overall, though, a generally well-told life. (Photos)
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-158-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
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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