Fast-talking, name-dropping, and skin-deep posthumous memoirs, from the superagent and Oscar party host. Raised in a Yiddish-speaking household in Brooklyn, pint-size Lazar developed street smarts, fastidious grooming habits, and a voracious urge for success. A Brooklyn Law School classmate offered a way into MCA, the talent agency, and before long Lazar was booking bands into hotels and nightclubs and mastering the guerrilla salesmanship that fueled the business. In 1942 he enlisted and soon was producing a huge-deal Air Force benefit. He introduced himself to Moss Hart in a bar and finagled him into writing and directing Winged Victory, which garnered rave reviews- -and a high profile for Lazar. In 1947 Lazar opened his own Hollywood agency, specializing in playwrights from the Northeast. Describing himself as a ``pushy outsider,'' Lazar badgered his friends for introductions, picked up checks in restaurants, and assiduously buddied up to the talented and famous. His no-holds- barred business tactics included setting unprecedented prices, selling properties that he didn't represent, and unloading plays he deemed marked for failure onto unwitting producers before they opened and flopped. Anecdotes from his social life include accounts of catching his neighbor Frank Sinatra shooting a BB gun at portraits of Ava Gardner, of his role in Lauren Bacall's breakup with Sinatra, and of Humphrey Bogart's alcohol-induced bad behavior. Collaborator Tapert's clear-eyed epilogue stands in pronounced counterpoint to Lazar's breathless litany of aspiration and achievement: She recounts his emotional breakdown after the death of his wife and the isolation of his final year. Gossip and blow-by-blows of negotiating bouts offer tasty hors d'oeuvres, but those seeking introspection or insight into the relationship of old Hollywood to new will come away from this showy buffet still hungry. (75 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80418-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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