A volume for those fed up with “news” about Oprah’s weight and the Bennifer breakup.
Collection of provocative profiles from Vanity Fair, showing those who’ve lived on Mars for the past ten years the power celebrities wield in America.
A sex scandal destroyed movie comic Fatty Arbuckle’s career in the 1920s; today it would make him bigger than ever. That’s essentially the conclusion Orth draws in her portraits of Madonna, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, and others. The public’s appetite for celebrity news may go further back in time than the author acknowledges, but there’s no arguing with her statement that cable TV’s 24/7 reporting has turned the public into celebrity news bulimics. Just about anyone, Orth writes, can feed the media and become famous, whether or not they’re talented (to wit: Madonna). And someone famous can get away with just about anything (to wit: Woody Allen taking nude pictures of the adopted daughter he would eventually marry, or Michael Jackson dangling a baby from a hotel window). Orth also describes how Andrew Cunanan became the darkest of American celebrities when he shot and killed Gianni Versace and then himself. She builds a disturbing case for the influence of celebrity millions in political arenas as she reports on Bill Clinton’s presidential pardon of billionaire Marc Rich. Of course, Orth herself writes for a celebrity-driven publication, and these pieces will be read (with some guilt perhaps) by readers eager to scarf up crumbs about Liz and Liza. The author’s use of quotes from unnamed sources and her subjects’ former employees is journalistically questionable, but her details hit their marks, as in the profiles of deposed Maggie Thatcher and retired ballerina Margot Fonteyn. Dame Margot makes Orth nostalgic for the days when the famous were also talented.
A volume for those fed up with “news” about Oprah’s weight and the Bennifer breakup.Pub Date: May 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7545-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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