Best for undiscriminating movie fanatics.
A colorful movie life in a monochrome biography.
If the name of Merian C. Cooper doesn’t ring a bell, his most famous creation certainly will: he was the driving force behind King Kong. But that was just one of many peaks in a life rich with adventure and drama. Cooper was a WWI pilot; a mercenary for the Polish Air Force; a Russian POW during the brief Soviet-Poland war of 1920 (he bolted in a daring escape across enemy lines); a filmmaker who shot groundbreaking features in Abyssinia, Persia and Siam (today’s Ethiopia, Iran and Thailand); an aide to General Claire Chennault during WWII; and the man who changed the face of movies through his production of 1935’s Technicolor feature Becky Sharp and 1952’s widescreen epic This is Cinerama. Yet for a man who may have had a larger-than-life existence, Cooper comes through in this quotidian biography as a fairly enigmatic and elusive figure. Vaz (The Art of the Incredibles, 2004, etc.), a frequent contributor to Cinefex magazine, brushes over unsavory aspects of his personality, most notably his failure to embrace an illegitimate son he left in Poland, and he doesn’t examine the creative process that went into his groundbreaking work (Becky Sharp gets just two paragraphs). The soul of the man is conspicuously absent—we learn what he made but never what inspired him to it. Cooper’s career, in fact, was rooted in collaborative efforts. Early projects were co-helmed with Ernest C. Schoedsack, and it’s doubtful King Kong would have come to life without the special effects of Willis O’Brien or the driving force of producer David O. Selznick (who later burned the sets to show the incineration of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind). Cooper’s later projects were also strictly collaborative: he co-produced with John Ford (most notably The Searchers), and This is Cinerama was fueled by Fred Waller’s technical innovations and Mike Todd’s showmanship. Perhaps Cooper’s success came from knowing who to team with.
Best for undiscriminating movie fanatics.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6276-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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