Sikov’s focus is not always as sharp and as deep as expected, but he captures the punch of an actress who succeeded in spite...
Film historian Sikov (On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder, 1999) steps into the ring with battlin’ Bette of Warner Bros.
Like many of her biographers, friends, ex-husbands, directors, costars and everyone else within shouting distance of Bette Davis, Sikov finds the diva a tempest. Indeed, the turbulent currents of her personality at times drew the author to “brooding darkly.” Nonetheless, his passion for her films prevailed, the focus of his book becoming not her life, he writes, but her work. And that he greatly admires. He combs production records of her films, particularly the classics she made at Warner. His penchant for nailing down who did exactly what on her films at times slows momentum, however vital the details are to a full record of the star’s career. What surprises are the number of bad films—and bad performances—Davis delivered. (Anyone for Deception with Claude Rains?) That she remains justly regarded as a major screen artist attests to the talent and tenacity Sikov describes. He makes it clear Davis often had good reason to fight for better scripts, directors and costars, even if doing so meant suspension and financial loss by the hand of Jack Warner. Sikov vividly limns Davis’ work in classics such as Dark Victory, Now Voyager and All About Eve. But his critiques, alas, are not as full as those of biographer Barbara Leaming (Bette Davis: A Biography, 2003). Perhaps, despite his best intentions, Sikov ended up distracted by the star’s abusive marriages, self-destructive habits and boorish behavior—enervating topics all.
Sikov’s focus is not always as sharp and as deep as expected, but he captures the punch of an actress who succeeded in spite of—and because of—herself.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7548-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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