Readers interested in finding out more about Stewart and his distinguished career, his signal roles in movies such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Winchester '73, Harvey, and Vertigo, should steer far wide of this stunningly inept work. This is not a biography in any conventional sense. A few facts and dates may flutter by, events come and go, but this is essentially a dull exercise in cheap and unconvincing sensationalism. Under the smarmy pretense of presenting the ``whole'' Stewart, veteran celebrity dirt-digger Quirk (Totally Uninhibited: The Life and Wild Times of Cher, 1991, etc.) unearths only a few spoonfuls of unsubstantiated innuendo. And it all comes down to this: Stewart may or may not have been bisexual and may or may not have had affairs with actors such as Henry Fonda. Not much to build a book around, especially considering that Quirk has almost no proof for any of this beyond allegation and insinuation: Stewart was roommates with Fonda; he married late, at 41; he enjoyed the masculine camaraderie of the air force during his WW II service. And these paltry imputations are Quirk's strongest evidence. Because he is so obsessed with his hypothesis, he has little time, beyond a sentence or two, for other dirt, such as Stewart's supposed cheapness. For its genre, this book is remarkably pallid, lacking even a scintilla of gabby, trashy fun. Not a wonderful account of a life. (50 b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55783-329-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Applause
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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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