The life story of respected actor Eva Le Gallienne (18991991) and a case for her deep influence on the American theater. Robert A. Schanke beat Sheehy by four years with his Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne (not reviewed), but Sheehy (Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones, not reviewed) bests Schanke by size—her narrative is some 300 pages longer. But in this case, more is not necessarily better. Sheehy, unlike Schanke, enjoyed unlimited access to Le Gallienne's voluminous diaries and correspondence, and offers a sea of details (like the Christmas gifts she bought her friends in 1948) that will make her book valuable to Le Gallienne's fans and to theater students and scholars, but a long and tedious read to just about anyone else. Where Sheehy succeeds admirably (as did Schanke) is in presenting the now relatively forgotten Le Gallienne as one of the most important figures of the 20th-century American theater. Le Gallienne left Broadway at the height of her fame in 1926 to found the Civic Repertory Theatre, America's first nonprofit theater, and the embodiment of her ultimately failed dream to found a national company like those that flourish in Europe. Her lifelong advocacy of a noncommercial theater of quality, accessible to the masses, and her refusal to sacrifice her art for popular success, made her an enormously influential figure within the theater community. Le Gallienne was a woman of fascinating complexity: a great actor who went years without a starring role; a scholar whose translations made Ibsen's plays presentable to American audiences; a woman who drank too much and was often unfaithful to her lesbian lovers. She was, in fact, in many ways quite like her father, the alcoholic poet Richard Le Gallienne, who abandoned his family when Eva was a baby. Unfortunately, Sheehy's book tends to lose sight of a remarkable woman in a forest of details.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41117-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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