An honest, eloquent, memorable autobiography.
The diminutive, unforgettable creator of the emcee in Cabaret both on stage and on screen writes frankly of his diverse career, exacting mother, and public embrace of his homosexuality.
Although Joel Grey, born Joel Katz in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932, hated the role of master of ceremonies that he seemed to command from an early age, he unlocked the character in 1966 after 15 years of struggling to fulfill his dream of creating his own role on Broadway. His portrayal of the emcee in Hal Prince’s Broadway production of Cabaret emerged as brilliantly “mercenary, lascivious, and menacing” and made his career, earning him Tony and Academy awards. The first son to Grace Epstein and musician Mickey Katz, who eventually played with Spike Jones in Los Angeles, where the family moved in 1945, Grey caught the acting bug early on in Cleveland theaters, where, as a short, pixie-ish kid, he felt accepted and loved. However, his ambivalent sexuality meant that he had both girlfriends and secret boyfriends, and when he had to reveal a seduction by a male friend, his mother turned away from him emotionally. The theater, then, became his haven, and instead of pursuing his dream of college at UCLA, he dove into the nightclub circuit, represented by big-time agents. As Grey writes, “achieving some level of fame could protect me from the kind of rejection I had experienced from my own mother after she discovered I had had an affair with another man.” Marriage to a fellow actress brought out his intense yearning for fatherhood and domesticity, and although the couple had two children and many years of happiness, Grey’s inability to sanction his wife’s own career and his latent homosexuality doomed the marriage. In the last few chapters, the author elucidates his stunning Cabaret success and “coming out” in the role of Ned Weeks in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in the mid-1980s.
An honest, eloquent, memorable autobiography.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05723-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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