Selective but not sketchy, with vivid, valuable recollections of Broadway during its golden age.
Warm, ingratiating memoir of an acting career spanning 60 years.
Born in 1915 in Brooklyn, Wallach resisted his family’s insistence that he become a teacher. When he failed a qualifying exam (deliberately?), the classroom’s loss became theater and film’s great gain. In the early ’40s, he auditioned for the Neighborhood Playhouse’s feared guru, Sanford Meisner, who told Wallach it would take 20 years for him to learn how to act. After Army service interrupted his assault on Broadway, Wallach returned to Times Square, making the rounds with such fellow hopefuls as Tony Randall, Marlon Brando and a feisty, attractive redhead who later became his wife and frequent acting partner, Anne Jackson. A genial raconteur, Wallach comes up with a good story for every play or film he recalls. One night after making his entrance in The Rose Tattoo, he caught costar Maureen Stapleton turning upstage to yawn. About to begin a performance of The Teahouse of the August Moon, he got a thumbs up from a stagehand who raised the curtain, then fell over dead. The show went on. Film offers came Wallach’s way in the mid-’50s, bringing hard-to-resist opportunities to travel and make good money. His portrait of John Huston directing The Misfits is far less negative than other accounts of that production, and the actor’s vivid sketch of Sergio Leone also bolsters a directorial reputation. Whatever demons may have haunted Wallach’s life are mostly kept offstage. Onstage fights with Jackson in plays like The Madwoman of Chaillot, he writes, became pressure valves that have kept their marriage going for 56 years.
Selective but not sketchy, with vivid, valuable recollections of Broadway during its golden age.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101189-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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