An engrossing chronicle of Garbo's sexual friendships with Mercedes de Acosta and Cecil Beaton, based on letters, journals, and personal interviews. Vickers (Vivien Leigh, 1989, etc.) has had access to the personal papers of all three of his subjects; consequently, his story is well-substantiated, largely free of the baseless conjecture that mars so many celebrity biographies. Screenwriter and playwright de Acosta seems to have been a sort of Pamela des Barres of the early screen set: She had serious affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Ona Munson, and numerous other actresses, though Garbo was the great love of her life. After their off-and-on affair ended in the 1930s, though, Garbo was clearly less interested in keeping up the friendship and, indeed, frequently refused to acknowledge de Acosta at all. Cecil Beaton had a 30-year friendship with Garbo that was sometimes platonic, sometimes passionately sexual, and, like Garbo's relationship with de Acosta, often terribly one-sided. Beaton was obsessed with Garbo and wanted to marry her; at certain points in their acquaintance, he would write to her every day, and she would go months without deigning to reply. Garbo remains a bit remote throughout this narrative, partly because, as in most love stories, the more passionate characters are better developed and partly because Vickers must paraphrase Garbo's letters (he was, in many cases, not allowed to quote them directly). Being Beaton's literary executor, Vickers sometimes relies too heavily on the photographer's papers to provide a full account of either de Acosta or Garbo. Beaton is often quoted for pages at a time, uninterrupted by authorial interpretation or a conflicting version of events; his voice and perspective tend to dominate the book. Classy, well-documented gossip, though hardly the balanced portrait of three people that the subtitle suggests. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41301-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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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