Strictly for the fans, but for them most welcome.
Carefully rendered portrait of a once-popular but now largely forgotten screen siren, the archetypal “Fox blonde” who set the tone for Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe.
Grable and Monroe, writes Southern Methodist University librarian Elder, “held measures of honesty, vulnerability, and sex appeal—but never in the same captivating combination” as Alice Faye (1915–98). Born Alice Jeane Leppert in Hell’s Kitchen, the child of a New York beat cop, she was a natural talent—maybe a little chubby, her early employers thought, but a standout in the chorus line who, as Rosemary Clooney remarked, “left her mark on every song she introduced.” A contract player for Twentieth Century-Fox under the notoriously difficult Darryl Zanuck, Faye got her big break when Jean Harlow fell ill during the shooting of In Old Chicago and died shortly thereafter; though the studio had been carefully grooming Faye in Harlow’s image, Elder points out, she still had to fight to get the role that brought her stardom after the film was released in 1938. Faye’s battles with Zanuck were legendary, so bitter that she walked off a set in 1945 and to all intents never returned to the screen, though she kept a toe in Hollywood and from time to time participated in benefits and starry cavalcades. Old-timers will also recall that Faye served as a spokeswoman for the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. “Not only was she free of any hint of scandal or inappropriate behavior,” writes Elder, “but she truly believed what she said.” The author does a fine job of capturing Faye’s talent and dry wit, to say nothing of her fiery dislike for the suits, but this is pretty much a specialty item, since the prim and proper bombshell’s handful of films turn up from time to time on cable TV but rarely figure in standard movie-industry histories.
Strictly for the fans, but for them most welcome.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57806-210-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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