Scholarly, impassioned and riveting—a dandy corrective to an undervalued legacy and an immersive trip through a vanished era...
The life and career of a protean figure from Hollywood’s early days.
The present obscurity of Victor Fleming (1889–1949) doesn’t reflect the extent of his influence and achievements, suggests Baltimore Sun film critic Sragow (editor: James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism, 2005, etc.). Displaying an early fascination with and facility for things mechanical, the California native occupied himself with automobiles before devoting his energies to photography, which led him to work as a cinematographer and director for MGM. Sragow authoritatively discourses on Fleming’s strengths as a filmmaker, analyzing the director’s knack for conveying the kinetic excitement of what were, after all, moving pictures, his ease with a diverse range of genres and his deft touch with actors. Douglas Fairbanks, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Jean Harlow were among those who developed much of their iconic personae through their associations with Fleming. Sragow provides ample evidence that his male stars incorporated the director’s mystique into their own on-screen identities, quoting family members and colleagues who inevitably described Fleming as an uncommonly charismatic man’s man: a sportsman, gentleman and irresistible catnip to the ladies, including lovers Clara Bow and Ingrid Bergman. (He directed Bergman in Joan of Arc, a punishing project and critical flop that may well have lead to his premature death.) Fleming’s most famous accomplishment is his miraculous 1939 double-header. After The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind foundered in early going with their original directors, he stepped in and stewarded two of cinema’s all-time classics to the screen despite impossibly difficult technical demands, studio politics and temperamental talent. The section on these two films alone, filled with backstage gossip and expert insight into the methods of Golden Age studio filmmaking, is worth the price of admission, but the rest of Sragow’s meticulously researched and engrossing history of this largely forgotten great director is a must for any serious movie fan.
Scholarly, impassioned and riveting—a dandy corrective to an undervalued legacy and an immersive trip through a vanished era of popular entertainment.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-40748-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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