Monumental scissors-and-paste production on the lives of Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Montgomery Clift. The five lives retold here intertwined with one another; four came to hard ends. Taylor, the survivor, arrived in Hollywood first, as a child star (Lassie Come Home), followed soon after by fellow child star Wood. Taylor found herself falling for brilliant Broadway actor Monty Clift, now her costar in A Place in the Sun. When Clift was revealed to be gay, she told him she'd always be there when he needed her—and he needed her often. Clift had unresolved mother problems he acts out with a fellow drunk/pothead/pillhead, aging singer-actress Libby Holman. When Holman read the Sunset Boulevard script (Clift had signed for the male lead as a failed scriptwriter studding for an aging Hollywood siren), she felt vast discomfort at the story's closeness to home and persuaded him to get out of the role. Meanwhile, young Roy Scherer, Jr., later known as Roy Fitzgerald, then as Rock Hudson, all milk-faced good looks and toothiness, signed up with voracious homosexual agent Henry Willson, who led him from bed to bed through the lower levels of B-pix to eventual stardom with Taylor and young genius James Dean in Giant. Dean, meanwhile, himself a bisexual, had been romancing Wood, his costar in Rebel Without a Cause—and then stir in Warren Beatty, Mike Todd, Richard Burton, Dean's car crash, Monty's drugs, Natalie's big dip, Rock's AIDS, and so on, if you're still awake. Parker offers not a single fact not already ground to pulp by earlier bios and the scandal sheets.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8184-0539-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
