Next book

THE UNRULY LIFE OF WOODY ALLEN

A BIOGRAPHY

A literary Hedda Hopper dishes dirt on the director and evokes pity rather than disgust. Veteran biographer Meade (Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, 1995, etc.) gets down to business in her first chapter, which recounts Mia Farrow’s discovery of his erotic photos of her teenage daughter Soon-Yi. That unbeatable opening segues into a chronicle of Allen’s life on-screen and with women, backed by a broad range of interviews with ex-wives, film associates, and paparazzi. Film tidbits abound as Meade details how Allen pushed Warren Beatty out of What’s New Pussycat?, balked at changing the title Anhedonia to Annie Hall, and panted for the approbation of film critics, particularly Vincent Canby. Critical analysis, thankfully, is limited to reviewers— reactions and box-office business. Along the way to success come the women, from first wife Harleen, whose relentless exploitation in Allen’s work gained her a lifetime settlement, to the teenager whose —mature— affair with Allen inspired Manhattan. There’s nothing new about Diane Keaton, except that Allen reserved a drawer for her in the bedroom set he and wife Louise Lasser shared. But when Meade catches up with Mia, the author bares all: the romance, the arguments in front of the tots, and the chilling $7 million legal marathon that left Allen unable to see all his children and shadowed by child-molestation charges. After this spectacle, talk of how little Soon-Yi knew of Allen’s films and how she dragged him to fashion shows comes as a relief, as does the climactic appearance of the couple’s child, Bechet Dumaine. As Roger Ebert says of the Mia—Woody—Soon-Yi situation, —Life goes on.— Fueled by tart anecdote, graphic scene-making, and glib analysis, Meade’s tell-all charges like a 20-mule—team People article. But it delivers on the biographical form’s promise of illuminating portraiture, explaining why, after decades of boyishness, Allen now appears —older than his age.— (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2000

ISBN: 0-684-83374-3

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 10


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 10


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview