A third-rate biography of a second-rate talent. Even a fading camp icon like Midler deserves better than Mair's (Oprah Winfrey, 1994, not reviewed, etc.) breathless yet strangely feeble account. Despite its subtitle, this book, which has all the intimacy of a handshake, seems more of a testament to the NEXIS database than anything approaching original authorial research. Mair manages the remarkable feat of simultaneously telling us both more and less than we ever wanted to know as he traces Midler's rise from a lonely Jewish girl growing up in Hawaii to her mild accomplishments as chanteuse, actress, and occasional author. Every wonderful and fabulous and sensational twitch of an achievement by Midler is catalogued, with just a grudging iota of elbow room set aside for her less than wonderful, fabulous, and sensational moments. So she has a reputation for being incredibly difficult to work with? Tra-la-la. So she fired her entire musical troupe after a concert tour? Tiddley pom. Mair makes few attempts to understand Midler, to subject her and her talents to the kind of considered critical or psychological analysis usually found in biographies. In fact, Mair seems perfectly content to luxuriate in the reflected glow of his subject's general stupendousness. As he writes, ``We love her because she is us and we are her.'' Almost in spite of himself, Mair occasionally stumbles across something interesting. His brief analysis of the difficulties older actresses have finding roles (women over 40 get only 9 percent of all roles) borders on the trenchant. He also manages a reasonable understanding of Midler's resonant appeal to gay audiences. Not so much a tell-all biography as a fawning and amateurish show-and-tell. (24 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55972-272-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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