Solid work in desperate need of the careful attention of a competent copy editor.
Well-informed biography of the flamboyant director, utterly lacking the stylishness that made his films so memorable.
The son of touring players, Vincente Minnelli (1903–86) had only the briefest experience of the kind of small-town, Midwestern life he would later enshrine in such popular MGM fare as Meet Me in St. Louis and Father of the Bride. Film scholar Levy (All About Oscar, 2003, etc.) does a commendable job with Minnelli’s early professional years in Chicago and New York, where he dressed department-store windows and designed sets and costumes for movie theaters’ stage shows; he would remain deeply, some said overly, concerned with visual effects in all of his films. Levy also evinces a solid understanding of the essentially somber worldview that made Minnelli as successful with melodramas like The Bad and the Beautiful as with such brilliant musicals as An American in Paris and Gigi. He was the quintessential studio director, capable in most genres and able to produce highly personal work within the assembly-line system’s confines. Indeed, first wife Judy Garland complained that he didn’t support her in the battles with MGM that led to her spectacular flameout and the couple’s divorce. The bisexual Minnelli’s stormy union with Garland is the only one of his four marriages that receives much attention here, and only a single male partner is mentioned by name. Aside from a rather catty portrait of his close bond with daughter Liza, the director’s personal life is scanted in favor of his career, which makes sense since he lived for his work. Levy’s judgments about the films are sound; it’s a pity they’re conveyed in dreadful, occasionally incomprehensible prose. This sentence about Father of the Bride is regrettably typical: “Stanley confronts his worst fear of humiliation, here reflected actually a nightmare rather than imagining or dreaming about at.” Such painfully inept presentation undercuts the author’s strong case that Minnelli is the most underrated of Hollywood’s Golden Age craftsmen.
Solid work in desperate need of the careful attention of a competent copy editor.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-32925-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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