Casts a bright light on the dark past of a superb artist who cozied up to killers, got what she wanted and spent the ensuing...
A well-researched, judicious view of the life of the woman whose arresting images of the Third Reich pursued her until her death in 2003, at the age of 101.
Riefenstahl cooperated somewhat with Trimborn (Film, Theater, Art History/Univ. of Cologne), though as he shows repeatedly, she guarded her story with Cerberean ferocity. For nearly 60 years, she denied and lied about her past, and Trimborn does his best to separate truth from fiction and self-deception. For her early life, he is forced to rely on her memoirs (Leni Riefenstah, 1993), a volume he calls “worthless as a historical document.” Trimborn tells us about Riefenstahl’s harsh father, her youthful determination to be a dancer (a knee injury ended her promising career), her explosive arrival in the 1920s German cinema as a sexy star of the “mountain film” genre. Trimborn shows Riefenstahl’s fierce ambition to become a director in a male-dominated art form. In the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler became her hero, her patron. (Trimborn does not think anything sexual occurred between them, though opportunities were ample.) For the Nazis she produced The Triumph of the Will, the world’s most notorious propaganda film, which premiered on the Führer’s birthday in 1938 and conferred upon her a celebrity she would never again enjoy. Trimborn examines all of Riefensthal’s films (with closest looks at her early ones) and views her principally as a “careerist.” She was interested in making films, and Hitler was a devoted supporter, funding her efforts even as Allied bombs rained on German cities. The author carefully chronicles Riefenstahl’s long post-war life: her numerous failed film projects, her many trips to Africa (her stunning photographs of the Nuba people made her financially secure once again), her late-life underwater film (Underwater Impressions, 2002).
Casts a bright light on the dark past of a superb artist who cozied up to killers, got what she wanted and spent the ensuing decades as the queen of denial.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-18493-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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