A bemused and indulgent look at the artist, all in good taste.
Charles Addams, longtime New Yorker cartoonist and creator of “The Addams Family,” was a gentle soul manipulated by women, according to Davis’s largely anecdotal biography.
Davis, who has written about Stephen Crane (Badge of Courage, 1998) and Katherine S. White (Onward and Upward, 1987), plays up—without delving too deeply—the contrast between Addams’s public persona and how he was in real life. The author apparently spoke with legions of people to recreate this teeming life, and the problem may be that Addams, born in 1912 in Westfield, NJ, was generally well-liked. A gifted illustrator as a kid, and persistent in submitting his work to the New Yorker, he got his first decorative spot accepted in the magazine at age 20 and his first cartoon a year later. He grew racier in style, moving from line drawings to wash, often relying on gag writers for material. He made a name for himself drawing “aberrations in life,” with a hint of violence—never actually shown. The “dark lady” of Addams’s cartoons—Morticia Addams—made her debut in the New Yorker on Aug. 6, 1938. Editor Harold Ross encouraged Addams to further develop the characters of this intriguing family when the series became a TV show. Meanwhile, Addams lived the high life. He married three times and became entangled with a series of women named Barbara, including his second wife, Barbara Barb, a manipulative lawyer who managed to finagle the rights to much of Addams’s real estate and art work. The homely, big-eared artist was still squiring beauties into his golden years, namely Joan Fontaine and Greta Garbo. He died in 1988.
A bemused and indulgent look at the artist, all in good taste.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-679-46325-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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