Only for fans of a golden era of Hollywood stardom, as long as they’re not looking for much gossip or personal revelation.
The author makes her case that Myrna Loy (1905–1993) could inspire a fascinating biography, but she doesn’t really deliver one.
Though Loy was once one of Hollywood’s leading female stars, Leider (Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino, 2003, etc.) maintains that she was underappreciated, partly because of the subtlety of her craft. She was too much the complementary role player—most memorably as Nora to William Powell’s Nick Charles in The Thin Man and sequels—rarely the spotlight diva whose dark passions might pique the curiosity of the public. In this comprehensive and cliché-ridden biography, the author shows that irony, complexity and contradiction provided tension between Loy’s public image(s) and her private life. Initially known for the exotic features that inspired the Asian screen surname that the former Myrna Williams adopted, she was in fact an all-American, freckle-faced ranch girl from Montana. Later dubbed “the Perfect Wife” for the roles for which she was typecast, she had four broken marriages to men who were unfaithful to her and/or unsuitable for her. She was even the target of some McCarthy-era red-baiting, though the lifelong liberal Democrat was an outspoken anti-communist. Other than Loy’s autobiography, written toward the end of her long life, this is the first biography of the actress, and it draws heavily from Loy’s book. Leider offers a summary of every career step and (it seems) every one of the “staggering 124 films” she made. Yet either there wasn’t much psychological depth to Loy, or Leider was unable or unwilling to probe it. For all of the encyclopedic detail devoted to the life, the book mainly illuminates the art of “an enormously subtle actress, whose minimalism belied her mysterious powerhouse capabilities.” Such subtlety accounts for the fact that even when the Oscars paid considerable attention to her hits such as The Thin Man and The Best Years of Our Lives, they didn’t even bestow nominations on Loy.
Only for fans of a golden era of Hollywood stardom, as long as they’re not looking for much gossip or personal revelation.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-520-25320-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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