An impressive work of scholarship, this collection offers a sweeping look at 60 years of American popular culture and an...
An engrossing collection chronicles the acclaimed director’s life and work.
Kazan (1909–2003) directed both plays and movies, winning Tony Awards, Oscars and many other awards. He also wrote a handful of novels and more than 1,200 letters. The Devlins have judiciously chosen 300, providing an informative context of theater and film history spiced with a hefty dose of gossip. Kazan’s correspondents feature a prominent cast of producers, actors and playwrights, as well as his wife and children. He wrote to John D. Rockefeller III about establishing Lincoln Center’s Repertory Theatre, of which Kazan became co-director; to John Steinbeck about the filming of his novel East of Eden (1955), with the unknown actor James Dean; to writer Budd Schulberg, explaining why Marlon Brando was “WRONG” for On the Waterfront (Kazan considered the very young Paul Newman: “This boy will definitely be a film star”). The letters reveal Kazan as restless, opinionated and fiercely ambitious. “I always had a great thirst for knowledge,” he wrote when he was 23. “When I was younger I actually had a fear that some kid would know more about some subject than I did. I tried to know everything about everything.” That fear persisted: When he was 45, he confessed to having “very large self doubts, especially on an intellectual level.” His doubts, though, did not deter him from challenging projects, including Thornton Wilder’s enigmatic The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949) and After the Fall (1964). He was Tennessee Williams’ director of choice, beginning with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1956) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1960). Copious letters to his wife reveal both his passion for his work and his many affairs (one with the “touching pathetic waif” Marilyn Monroe).
An impressive work of scholarship, this collection offers a sweeping look at 60 years of American popular culture and an intimate portrait of one complex man whirling at its center.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-26716-0
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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