A gaudy second installment of memoirs. Collins (Past Imperfect, 1984) is a survivor. For almost 50 years, she has cobbled together a career in mass-market culture- -including TV shows, pulp fiction, and scores of mostly forgettable movies—happily sporting the doe eyes, pancake makeup, and slash of red lipstick they taught her to wear at Fox, where she went to work for Darryl Zanuck in the '50s. Among the events she recollects here are: being touted as a ``vestpocket Ava Gardner''; being picketed by an estranged husband with a sign reading, ``Joan, you have our $2.5 million, 13,000 sq. ft. home. . . . I am now homeless. Help!''; and chatting with Jayne Mansfield, who made small talk as a makeup man shaved her pubic hair into a heart shape. She's had four husbands, younger lovers, and was propositioned by Robert Kennedy (she heroically declined). Though Collins philosophizes about this-and-that (``Fidelity seems to be a trait in short supply with most men, male `equipment' being able to rise to stimulating opportunities with alacrity''), there's not much introspection here. Of Peter Holm, her much publicized third husband, she says simply, ``His tyranny, dual personality and definite sociopathic tendencies were making me feel as though I was playing Ingrid Bergman's role in Gaslight.'' But Collins matter-of-factly describes her life's challenges: Her daughter Katy was hit by a car and badly injured, and Collins spent years as her family's breadwinner, making quickie movies in order to pay the bills. She rarely complains, though like Dynasty's Alexis Carrington, she can be bitchy. Describing her former editor Joni Evans, who testified against Collins in her lawsuit against Random House: ``I was surprised by her raddled appearance and how much older she looked since last we'd met.'' In an earlier age, this would have been perfect reading for under the hairdryer. (photos, not seen) (TV satellite tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16997-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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