Fishgall, an actor and director who has written for show-biz trade papers, makes his hardcover debut with a biography of one of the greatest of postWW II movie stars. Burt Lancaster was an unlikely candidate for movie stardom. As a kid growing up in a railroad flat in the Italian section of East Harlem, he was a voracious reader, ardent opera fan, and avid moviegoer, but not someone who had ever manifested the slightest interest in acting until he became involved with the Union Settlement House. Later, in the sort of career move that helps build legends, Lancaster quit New York University in his sophomore year to join the circus with his lifelong friend and sometime partner, Nick Cravat. Through a combination of luck and timing he made his way to Broadway and from there to Hollywood. With a huge success in his very first film, The Killers (1946), he was catapulted to almost instant stardom. Lancaster was one of the first actors to enjoy success with an independent production company of his own, paving the way for many others and hastening the demise of the studio system. He managed to balance commercial projects against more personal ones for most of his career, with satisfying results that are a testimony to his intelligence and taste. Fishgall recounts this career in a plodding, stolid prose, drawing heavily on old interviews and movie stars' memoirs. Although he interviewed 160 of Lancaster's colleagues and friends, the result has a flat, stale feeling. To its credit, the book offers an excellent filmography and listing of Lancaster's other work for stage and television. One of our most kinetic actors, Lancaster deserves a biography that is as filled with energy as he was. Despite its good intentions, this isn't it.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80705-X
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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