A crowded, thoroughly captivating canvas of cultural history.
Biographer and memoirist Holroyd (Mosaic, 2004, etc.) re-creates the separate and shared histories of two theater immortals.
The author begins with a fetching chronicle of actress Ellen Terry’s interrupted rise to fame among an itinerant family of actors in Victorian England, following the path trod by her immensely popular older sister Kate. Freed from an older husband, never quite compromised by an effervescent, affectionate nature that kept her on the threshold of scandal, Terry eventually formed a celebrated alliance with actor-manager Henry Irving, whose story then occupies center stage until the spotlight widens to their common history and eventually the stories of their gifted, troubled offspring. The pair that began it all were a study in contrasts. Terry was the enchanting, intuitively gifted beauty, Irving the scrupulously disciplined arch-professional. She was Ophelia to his Hamlet, his partner in the great success they enjoyed at London’s Lyceum Theatre and during a spectacularly popular American tour. Their respective children followed them into artistic circles. Henry’s two sons achieved reasonable success as actors, though nothing like their father’s renown. Terry’s daughter Edy Craig lived on the outskirts of England’s emerging lesbian culture. Her handsome brother Gordon Craig, an infamously waspish actor turned stage designer, virtually invented abstract scene design, when not fathering babies with an alarming number of smitten women. The acting gene re-emerged with brilliance in Terry’s great-nephew John Gielgud, whom Holroyd depicts as an incisive critic and superlative thespian. In addition to his replete portrayals of Terry and Irving, Holroyd offers a plethora of anecdotal and analytical information about acting technique and theater lore. Readers will relish such tidbits as the fact that Irving’s embattled business manager was Bram Stoker.
A crowded, thoroughly captivating canvas of cultural history.Pub Date: March 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-27080-3
Page Count: 622
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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