This first book by Los Angeles Times correspondent Herman is an exhaustively complete biography of Wyler, director of such acclaimed films as Ben-Hur, The Best Years of Our Lives, Wuthering Heights, Jezebel, and The Letter. William Wyler was the Hollywood director's director, a man whose work includes some of the most honored films of all time. A list of the stars he worked with is a veritable who's who of the film industry, led by Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, and Barbra Streisand. Ironically, as Herman recounts, Wyler was the black sheep of his family of well-to-do Alsatian Jews. He was a mischievous kid who managed to get himself thrown out of a fancy private school and who showed little inclination to apply himself to finding a career. Eventually, his doting mother would draw on a family connection to Carl Laemmle, founder and owner of Universal Pictures, shipping her son off to America with ``Uncle'' Carl. After a few false starts as a shipping clerk, publicity assistant, and gofer, the young Wyler began to work his way up the ladder, directing two-reel westerns before graduating to features. With the coming of sound, Wyler would quickly establish himself as a great director of actors and a maker of fluid, graceful films. Herman tells his story intelligently, offering portraits along the way of Wyler friends and nemeses like Sam Goldwyn and Darryl F. Zanuck. Herman is candid about such episodes as his protagonist's affair with Bette Davis and even manages to occasionally say some useful things about the films (he is particularly good on The Letter), although he's barking up the wrong tree when he suggests that the many Oscars won by Wyler films and their participants somehow certify Wyler's genius. A model Hollywood biography: cogent, to the point, candid, briskly written, and never dull.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14012-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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