Possessing a certain charm, but missing a lot of pieces. (Photos throughout)
Curious and evocative fragments of autobiography by boulevardier and screenwriter Moffat, gathered and embellished by Lambert (Natalie Wood, 2004, etc.).
Curious because Moffat struck no great sparks in a life devoted mainly to serial infidelities. In an extended introductory biography, Lambert paints a fast portrait. His parents left young Ivan in the aristocratic care of his grandmother, Lady Tree (which means he was raised by nannies), and boarding school offered the classic immersion in English bestiality. But during his WWII stint in the film corps, he met George Stevens and ignited his career as a screenwriter and script doctor. Moffat worked on Giant, Shane, A Place in the Sun, They Came to Cordura, and other film and TV productions—though his time in Hollywood was short. His later years were mostly given over to luxury (as much of it as he could afford or take advantage of) and romance. The glancing text is evocative because the catalogue of Moffat’s girlfriends, wives, and swell gatherings conjures up a world in which someone whose family was heavy on bloodlines though short on cash got to spend a good amount of time in the great houses and castles of Europe. The autobiographical component here, which Moffat wrote in fits and starts over the years, relates his days visiting with the vanishing aristocracy and the High Bohemia of the Gargoyle Club. Lambert includes letters and interviews, but they have a tendency to be superficial, such as an anecdote about how Stevens didn’t like Citizen Kane at first, then “reconsidered all that, and thought how serious and marvelous it was, one of the best films he’d ever seen.” There are a few good tidbits, however, as when Dylan Thomas advised Charlie Chaplin, who was having trouble with the press, to “tell them to go fuck their bloody eyelids.”
Possessing a certain charm, but missing a lot of pieces. (Photos throughout)Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42247-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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