A roughly chronological memoir of a life well-lived, full of specific portraits and vivid detail.
Off-the-cuff sketches from a rich, committed life.
Although he grew up among Hollywood royalty, the son of drama critic and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane, etc.), author Mankiewicz (Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life, 1978, etc.) did not follow the conventional moviemaking trajectory of his father but instead became active in politics. In this meandering memoir, left perhaps incomplete and edited by Swerdlow with the author’s death in 2014, he records with straightforward humor and concise prose the highlights from his extraordinary career, beginning with his stint as a soldier in World War II and culminating (but hardly ending) as an aide to Robert Kennedy. Written as a series of vignettes about people in his life or jobs he held, alternating with somewhat longer meditations on aging or language, the work is an unusual memoir, pleasant and frequently hilarious. The author’s remarks about his father’s writing of Citizen Kane (later contested by the supporters of the director) will be especially revealing, as the mysterious word “Rosebud” probably came from the name of the cherished new bike stolen from Herman as a kid. Radicalized by his work in Latin America while employed by the Peace Corps in the 1960s, the author became a speechwriter for RFK and a good friend, and his account of Kennedy’s important speeches and his “hold on people’s imaginations” are moving. He met with Fidel Castro many times in “some mild cloak-and-dagger” incidents at the behest of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Mankiewicz also delineates his work for NPR (he was president from 1977 to 1983), specifically his advocating for the hiring of women correspondents. The author’s later work in a public relations firm allowed him to indulge his love of information and opinion in the form of lobbying for favorite or quirky causes. Throughout, his writing is sharp and fearless.
A roughly chronological memoir of a life well-lived, full of specific portraits and vivid detail.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07064-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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 2026 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.
