A trifle repetitious, but a sympathetic, scholarly and often penetrating examination of an American original.
The private life of prolific playwright, screenwriter, director, novelist and essayist Mamet remains private in a biography focused on his work.
Outlining his themes in an introductory essay that could be a stand-alone piece, Nadel (Tom Stoppard, 2002, etc.) in subsequent chapters follows a fairly straightforward chronology. Born in Chicago in 1947, Mamet had a contentious relationship with his tough lawyer father; they reconciled much later. He spent most of his youth reading (Dreiser and Cather were favorites), practicing the piano and immersing himself in the wondrous world of Chicago theater. After high school, he headed for Vermont, attended Goddard College, worked on a Great Lakes ship in the summer and found himself ever more deeply in love with the stage. Nadel examines the early influences of acting theorists Richard Boleslavsky and Sanford Meisner on Mamet, then begins a play-by-play, film-by-film exegesis. Nadel tells us a bit about the playwright’s two marriages— to actress Lindsay Crouse from 1977 to 1990, and since 1991 to actress Rebecca Pidgeon, 19 years his junior—but he’s either not very interested in Mamet’s personal life or simply couldn’t turn up much. In any case, he keeps the focus on Mamet’s work, examining the magic of his rough dialogue, his emerging consciousness of his Judaism, his fascination with the macho worlds of knives and guns and mercenaries, his ferocious work ethic, his disdain for critics and his Faustian bargains with the Hollywood producers he reviles on page and stage. Nadel sees Mamet as a moral writer, a dramatist who sees con games everywhere and, like Hamlet, is driven nearly mad by “seeming” and lying.
A trifle repetitious, but a sympathetic, scholarly and often penetrating examination of an American original.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-29344-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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