The facts are here, but readers seeking a nuanced portrait of the actor should look elsewhere.
The short, shocking life of the Switchblade Kid.
Michaud charts the strange life and career of Sal Mineo (1939–1976), the boyish actor who attained instant iconic status as a troubled teen in the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause—only to find himself washed up by his early 30s, crippled by debt, reduced to dinner- and community-theater work and increasingly identified with a sordid gay demimonde before being fatally stabbed outside his home. The author takes a dry, journalistic approach to this grim, sensational material, and while his restraint may be admirable, it makes Mineo something of a cipher. The sweet neighborhood boy made good transforms into a sexually voracious man preoccupied by transgressive stories of perversion and rape, and the reader is never quite sure how that happened. Typecast after Rebel, Mineo struggled to branch out into more mature and varied performances, scoring with projects like The Gene Krupa Story (1959) and 1960’s Exodus (for which he received his second Oscar nomination, after Rebel), but Hollywood lost interest. Mineo would pursue one doomed project after another in a bid to rehabilitate his image. The failure of these projects is unsurprising—they invariably focused on exceedingly dark, sexually provocative subject matter completely at odds with Mineo’s image and prevailing audience taste. Mineo was engrossed in his own homosexual awakening in this period, but Michaud is hesitant to explore the connection or to examine Mineo’s psychology or artistic process in any meaningful way. Instead, the author reports with cold objectivity on the projects’ financing woes and Mineo’s many romantic entanglements, including trysts with actress Jill Haworth and teen idol Bobby Sherman. Mineo’s murder, apparently the result of a botched robbery attempt, was a sadly appropriate conclusion to the talented actor’s messy, mismanaged life and career.
The facts are here, but readers seeking a nuanced portrait of the actor should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-71868-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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