Life of legendary Jean Harlow, rescued from an abyss of scandal by journalist Golden. (One hundred illustrations, including exclusive family candids, not seen here.) Golden's is a well-researched, straightforwardly written bio with some but not too much background filler about MGM and the Thirties and with no urge to be memorably stylish or sumptuously lighted by MGM—though the publisher will undoubtedly make a gorgeous art deco production out of this smartly priced book. Born Harlean Carpenter in 1911, Harlow died at 26 of irreversible kidney failure brought on by an infection—from that early death her later biographer Irving Shulman fashioned the sleaze-riot Harlow: An Intimate Biography that has hidden the real Harlow for the past quarter century. From Kansas City, Missouri, Jean married a wealthy orphan at 16, divorced him at 20, by which time she'd already gotten parts as a film extra, then been taken on by Howard Hughes for some breast-peepery in Hell's Angels and kept out on loan until MGM bought her from Hughes. At MGM, she struck gold as a platinum vamp, a limitation she overcame as a comedienne in the fast-talking satire Bombshell. Her second marriage to top MGM producer Paul Bern ended with Bern's suicide; her third to MGM cameraman Hal Rosson ended in disaffection. She was engaged to William Powell, 18 years her senior (all her men were father figures) when she died. Along the way, she and Gable had become the first great team of the talkies. Saratoga, their last picture together, was completed by a double. Going by her friends' comments, Harlow was a joyful, warmhearted, generous woman, perhaps slightly undersexed, who smoked but never drank or drugged, was not foulmouthd, and clearly was a gifted comedienne. A compelling story—but add in the production values on this book.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1991
ISBN: 1-55859-214-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abbeville Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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
SEEN & HEARD
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