Stout, readable story about how a nice guy got his acting chops and became one of Hollywood’s greats.
An actor’s life, presented admiringly—after all, the subject is a plain-spoken American beau ideal.
Jimmy Stewart (1908–97), firmly lodged in the motion-picture pantheon throughout the studio-contract days and beyond, was a Princetonian, a modest war hero, sincerely Presbyterian, hardworking, happily married, politically conservative and a preternaturally gifted actor. As depicted by veteran Hollywood biographer Eliot (Cary Grant, 2004, etc.) in a full and fulsome portrait, he truly had a wonderful life. Discounting sojourns in theatre and later in TV, the Hollywood artist enjoyed one of the great film careers, starring in some of the classic Capra and Hitchcock films. Supporting players in his life story include Henry Fonda (as best friend), dazzling Margaret Sullavan, flawless Grace Kelly (for female leads) and an all-star cast of performers, producers, directors and agents. This is the story of how Stewart got the work he wanted and about the making and the makers of movies. There’s the obligatory backlot gossip concerning libidinous actors in heat (apparently their natural state) and some emblematic tittle-tattle. (Stewart, for example, was obliged to allay suspicions of homosexuality by visiting MGM’s in-house bordello.) Eliot succumbs to Variety-style jargon (“helmer” or “body-mover” for “director”) and hyperbolic press-agent syntax (“Jimmy was about to be reborn into the stratosphere of cinematic starlight”) and purple prose (he “was busy diving into the deep waters of Dietrich’s ocean of sexual delights”). The biographer provides major film-plot synopses with sexual and theological implications most readers surely never considered. In a shot at scholarship, he provides footnotes (frequently listing annual Oscars) as well as endnotes (with insufficient citations for many assertions). Nonetheless, Eliot makes abundant errors in minor details. But this casual treatment of extraneous facts hardly interferes with a good story about the movies and one of its stars.
Stout, readable story about how a nice guy got his acting chops and became one of Hollywood’s greats.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-5221-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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