Granger, who knows the dramatic when he sees it, fills his story with vivid moments from his career.
Actor Granger recalls life onstage and in film in an engaging, colorful memoir.
Granger had good looks, good luck and good timing, ending up center stage for the golden ages of film, Broadway and live TV. To get into films, he struggled naught. A casting director for Samuel Goldwyn spotted Granger at 18 acting in a play in Los Angeles. Goldwyn signed Granger to a long-term contract in 1943. A series of leading roles followed in mostly second-rate films. Granger fared better on loan-outs to other studios, especially to Warner Bros., where Hitchcock directed him in the classic suspenser Strangers on a Train. The catch was that Goldwyn added loan-out time to other Draconian contract terms. Reaching into Goldwyn’s grab-bag of hilarious malapropisms, Granger begged the producer to “Include me out.” Granger wanted to act and study acting in New York. Only after a costly settlement with Goldwyn was Granger freed. He then studied with Sandy Meisner, honed his craft in stock and TV and hit Broadway, at last, in the musical First Impressions, a flop. Continuing to work in film, he made Senso in Italy with Luchino Visconti. Granger’s extended production log for this film highlights the book. The actor offers less detail about the person, seldom providing glimpses of what he’s like between takes. He does recall affairs with women (Shelley Winters, Ava Gardner) and men (playwright Arthur Laurents) and writes of his bisexuality with equanimity: “I have loved men. I have loved women. I will talk with affection and without guilt or remorse about both in this book.”
Granger, who knows the dramatic when he sees it, fills his story with vivid moments from his career.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-35773-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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