A low-key but thoroughly fascinating biography.
Entertaining rescue of a forgotten show-business legend.
We tend to associate modern magic with Houdini, but he was not considered a great magician by most of his contemporaries. If asked to name the greatest magician, most would have named a Houdini rival, an entertainer few today have even heard of: Howard Thurston (1869–1936). When we think of the debonair performer in black tie who patters suavely with the audience while sawing women in half or pulling rabbits out of hats, we are conjuring the image Thurston spent 40 years in show business perfecting. According to Steinmeyer (Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, 2008), a magician, illusion designer and scholar of magic, Thurston may have lacked the dexterity and originality of some of his illustrious peers, but he brought the elements together to drag theatrical magic into the modern world. What made Thurston so great, Steinmeyer argues, was his utter belief in his own con. Though cultivating the illusion of the modern entertainer as a bland, upright businessman, Thurston was actually a one-time street urchin and pickpocket who, while on his way up, was not above grifting when the occasion called for it. The author ably conveys Thurston’s intriguing milieu and relentless adventuring (much of which he labored mightily to hide from the public)—his train-hopping boyhood and travels between carnivals to medicine shows in the wild West as an apprentice magician, his vaudeville and music-hall tours of the United States and Europe, his 1905–06 tour of Australia and the Far East and “last stand” as an itinerant movie-theater performer at the height of the Depression. Thurston’s rise to the heights of showbiz fame paralleled the thrilling American boom years between the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and the financial crash of 1929, and Steinmeyer, in his quiet, workmanlike way, captures it all vividly.
A low-key but thoroughly fascinating biography.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58542-845-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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