A paint-by-numbers biography of the much-married singer, actress, comedienne, pitchwoman. Martha “Maggie” Raye was literally born into show business, delivered between engagements in 1916 to a pair of struggling vaudevillians. Their own act had begun to grow stale, so it wasn—t long before Raye and her two siblings were drafted into the show. The child attracted some attention, but vaudeville was dying and her family played smaller and smaller engagements until work dried up almost entirely at the onset of the Depression. There hadn—t been much time or inclination for school, and Raye remained semi-literate throughout her adult life, relying on her manager (and one-time husband), Nick Condos, to read scripts aloud to her. Determined to support her family, teenage Maggie tried her hand at singing in nightclubs, which led to theater, then Hollywood. Raye possessed a remarkably versatile voice and a rare flair for knockabout, physical comedy; she was soon starring or co-starring in a host of largely forgettable musicals and comedies. With the entry of the US into World War II, she threw herself wholeheartedly into entertaining the troops, going where even Bob Hope wouldn—t dare: the most distant outposts, the most exposed positions. Her film career suffered, and by the end of the war it was almost over. Television and nightclubs filled the gap, and she continued to dedicate substantial amounts of time and energy to “her boys” in both Korea and Vietnam. Along the way, Raye found the time for seven marriages and a child she mistreated and neglected, although not quite at the Mommie Dearest level. Pitrone (The Dodges: The Auto Family Fortune and Misfortune, not reviewed, etc.) paints an acid-tipped portrait of a self-obsessed, heedless semi-star, but this account lacks any depth or perceptiveness. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8131-2110-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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