Scenes in search of a point of view. (photos)
A detailed, yet shapeless biography of a charming actor.
With the blessings of the late David Niven’s family, British novelist and journalist Lord (James Herriot: The Life of a Country Vet, 1997) provides a full account of what happened in Niven’s life, while offering little consideration of why they did. Why, for example, did Niven (1910–83) turn to acting? Lord suggests the familiar explanation: Niven lost his father at five, then was raised by a distant mother and an unloving stepfather, which made him insecure, a feeling assuaged by playing the clown in school plays. Growing up in England, Niven discovered the other pleasures that set his course: sex and beautiful women. Lord documents the actor’s prodigious conquests, referring several times to Niven’s considerable endowment. Did Niven become, as it appears, a serial seducer and alcoholic, particularly after the tragic death of his first wife? Lord leaves the matter largely unexplored, as he does the reasons for Niven’s staying in an apparently horrific marriage to a second wife. As for the actor’s film career, the author is again heavy with facts but light on commentary. That Niven remained an audience favorite for decades seems remarkable considering how many flops he lensed—The Brain, The Statue, and Vampira made the marquee along with Separate Tables and Around the World in 80 Days. Lord provides little anaylsis of Niven’s films, attributing his success largely to his skill at light comedy. Lord corrects the many tall tales with which Niven regaled friends and readers in two bestselling autobiographies. Leaving unexamined the actor’s reasons for fibbing, Lord writes that “one excellent joke is worth a hundred facts.” He certainly has the facts. Along with the conquests, films, and bottles of alcohol consumed, Lord tallies virtually every check the wealthy Niven issued to his family.
Scenes in search of a point of view. (photos)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32863-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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