Will appeal to film buffs and readers interested in the rise and burnout of long-ago Hollywood stars.
An extensively researched look at the life of silent-movie star Mae Murray (1885–1965).
Ankerich (Broken Silence: Conversations with 23 Silent Film Stars, 2011, etc.) structures this biography chronologically, beginning with Murray's birth to poor German immigrants in New York City's Lower East Side. As an adult, Murray offered little to no factual details about her childhood, shrouding "her own birth date and her early years in a veil of secrecy." Early on, she lost her father to alcohol-related complications; before she was 18, she cut off all contact with her mother and her brothers, one of whom showed up years later demanding money and threatening to reveal Murray's sordid family story to the press if she didn't pay up. Passionate about dancing, the teenage Murray lingered around stage doors and got her start in theater, dancing and singing. Ankerich tracks Murray’s multiple failed marriages and her lucrative career in Hollywood, including the dramatic back stories of such films as The Merry Widow. Her penchant for hiding the truth about her life revealed itself yet again when she secretly gave birth to a son in 1926. Five months later, despite her love for the man she described as her "soul mate," Rudy Valentino, Murray wed David Mdivani, an aspiring filmmaker who falsely identified himself as a Georgian prince. Shortly thereafter, Valentino died, leaving Murray devastated. Her marriage to Mdivani unraveled with endless fighting and a custody dispute as Murray struggled with financial problems that would plague her for the rest of her life. In 1965, she died of a stroke. Ankerich's studied biography leaves no stone unturned, and he integrates hundreds of quotations and sources, grounding Murray's life with fascinating facts.
Will appeal to film buffs and readers interested in the rise and burnout of long-ago Hollywood stars.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8131-3690-5
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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