Many interviews (though none with Connery) give a lift to this otherwise placid celebio of the popular actor, which follows on the heels of Andrew Yule's 1992 Connery bio of the same title—a much stronger work. There's really no need to read this new Parker (Prince Philip and Five for Hollywood—both 1991, etc.) if you've already read the Yule, though readers coming fresh to the life of Connery should find it steadily interesting, with Connery's quotes and maverick- like behavior giving bounce to some pages—as do the interviews. The actor's rise from rags to riches came about by indirection, with Connery—raised in Edinburgh—having many lowly jobs as a youth, then being dropped by the Royal Navy for a stomach ulcer after a year's service. His interest in bodybuilding led to a small part in a British roadshow of South Pacific, which led to larger parts on stage and TV, his first big role being the punch-drunk lead in Requiem for a Heavyweight. Connery, Parker tells us, liked Marlon Brando's underplaying and studied Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant's ways of bringing their roles to themselves rather than changing themselves for the roles. Parker respects his subject's private life far more than Yule does, and doesn't dig as deeply into the acting. Most interesting here is the information about Connery's avid pursuit of being paid well and to the penny for what he does, which brought about his suit against producer Albert R. Broccoli to collect money due for the actor's James Bond performances. Strong pages here and there, but many in Sunday supplement style. (Photographs)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8092-3668-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
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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