A lively, fast-paced account of the first 20 years of People magazine, from former People staff writer and author Kessler (Inside Today, 1992). In March 1974, when People brought out its first issue—with Mia Farrow on the cover and lots of white space and short text inside—staffers at Time, Inc., joked that the entire publication could be devoured, cover to cover, on the ride down the elevator from the 29th floor, where People's editorial offices were housed. Two decades later, People's unique brand of confessional journalism has been featured in TV talk shows and magazines around the country. In addictive, People-like prose, Kessler narrates the rise of the ``queen mother of personality journalism.'' Covered are Kessler's own disastrous interview with Danny Kaye when he insulted the Canadian head of UNICEF, spewing obscene and unprintable remarks; Harry Benson's photo session at Attica Prison with John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman; the Gary Hart-Donna Rice affair in which People pays Rice's sleazy friend, Lynn Armandt, $150,000 for her photos of Hart and Rice aboard the ``Monkey Business''; and the poignant saga of AIDS victim Ryan White and People's role in creating a celebrity of the teenager and extending his life a good five years. What Kessler fails to address, however, is the larger question of why so many people are so eager to confess the intimate details of their lives to the world. Why is Princess Di willing to appear on the cover of People over 50 times (more than any other cover subject in the magazine's history) and tell the hoi polloi about her rotten marriage, suicide attempts, battles with anorexia, etc? And why do we People readers—at last count, one out of ten Americans—hunger so shamelessly for news of Di and Charles, Liz and Larry, Julia and Lyle, or Burt and Loni? An entertaining yarn for the People mavens, but not for those in search of serious commentary on American culture. (16 pages b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: March 7, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42186-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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
SEEN & HEARD
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