The inside book on Woody Allen that his fans have been waiting for. This will likely be the cornerstone of all future Woody Allen studies, sincefor the first timeAllen himself is completely forthcoming with an interviewer and willing to fill in on his biography and comment on any aspect of his work. You could not ask for an Allen book that gets closer to the bone. Lax (Life and Death on 10 West, 1984; On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy, 1975) kept by Allen's side for three years during the writing, making, and editing of five films, followed scripts through their development, had the door opened for him by Allen to speak with all of Allen's friends and co-workers, which is to say that this is a book Allen was eager to see and warmly endorsed. This writing is unique in that while it stays generally on course as a chronology of Allen's life, it forever interrupts itself to show at length how later works spring out of earlier events in Allen's life, which gives a dense weave to the telling as scenes are discussed out of biographical order. The Allen who comes across here is a very cool and reserved person on the set who has to crank up his warmth when he plays ``Woody Allen'' for the camera. We follow his childhood compulsion for moviegoing through his Wunderkind years as a teen-age jokesmith for columnists and great TV comics, then his being taken under the wing of agents Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, whoin a grueling two-year periodturned him into a reluctant stand-up comic. They've never had a contract beyond a handshake, and quite early on Rollins and Joffe won complete artistic control of his films. Allen openly talks about his marriages and love life, his children, his failureshe never looks at his films after they're released, has no videocassettes of them, only sees their shortcomings (although The Purple Rose of Cairo comes closest to realizing his hopes), and he detests tapes of his early work on Candid Camera, The Tonight Show, etc. In one fascinating passage he comments on these routines while watching tapes, dismantling them in bloody surgical detail. Definitivefor now. And sheer heaven. (Sixteen pages of photographsnot seen.)
Pub Date: May 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58349-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
