A light entertainment.
The personal shutterbug for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton shares his behind-the-scenes impression of an age of glamour long gone.
As Bozzacchi (Elizabeth Taylor: The Queen and I, 2002) acknowledges, decades after the photos on which he built his reputation, “even if I got elected President of the United States, I’d still be remembered as the man who was once Elizabeth Taylor’s personal photographer.” He gives his readers what he knows they want: lot of photos of the star he knew as “Baby Boobs,” numerous anecdotes of the tempestuous couple (the author tried in vain to keep pace with Burton’s drinking), and some hit-and-run impressions of others who came into his orbit, often because he was in the famous couple’s orbit. Bozzacchi shot an official portrait of Princess Grace Kelly and her royal family as well as plenty of photos of her more casually posed (and shared here), largely because she had been so impressed with the way in which he captured the many dimensions of Elizabeth Taylor (who wrote the foreword to this book shortly before her death) and humanized her in the process. The author writes of the difficulties of shooting Picasso, of Al Pacino’s shyness, of his encounters with everyone from Rock Hudson to John Wayne to Elvis Presley to Raquel Welch (who may well have had a fling with Burton, though at least one of them was too drunk to remember). He insists that the famous cover of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road was his idea and that the band then took it to another photographer and that he recognized the potential in Rocky when it was still a screenplay. He also addresses the end of an era, as glossy magazines that prized beauty gave way to a thirst for scandal and photos that captured celebrities at less than their best.
A light entertainment.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8131-6874-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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