Run-of-the-mill bio of a mildly luminous Hollywood star. Born Phylis Isley in 1919, Jennifer Jones got her name—and her career—from movie mogul David Selznick, who put the 22-year- old actress under contract and landed her the title role in The Song of Bernadette, for which she won an Oscar in 1944. The fact that both of them were married (he to Louis B. Mayer's daughter Irene, she to troubled actor Robert Walker) and that she was the mother of two young boys didn't deter Selznick from pursuing the quietly ambitious Jones, and they eventually wed. She may well have regretted her decision to entrust her fortunes to the volatile Selznick. His insistence on overseeing every detail of her films, which grew more obsessive as his own stature declined, kept her idle for years between projects (at a time when most Hollywood stars worked constantly) and resulted in many overproduced clunkers, most famously the awful Duel in the Sun (1946). Jones survived, going on to give well-regarded performances in such successful movies as Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1955) and The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957), but she might have been a bigger star without him. Veteran Hollywood biographer Epstein (Mia, 1991, etc.) offers a workmanlike chronology of his subject's life, heavily padded with irrelevant gossip about peripheral characters. Treatment of her third marriage, to industrialist Norton Simon, is too brief and provides only sketchy coverage of such potentially juicy material as his controversial takeover of the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, to which his wife was named chairperson in 1977. Jones, who declined to cooperate with this book, comes across as shy, neurotic, and intensely private—a hardworking, serious actress, certainly, but since the author gives no evaluation of her talent other than quoting contemporary reviews, it's hard to know why we should care about her. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Movie Entertainment Book Club alternate)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-74056-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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
SEEN & HEARD
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