Autobiography of the actor, his first book (published in Britain as Travelling Player). Though ever striving for variety in his roles, York is best known in the States as a leading man and, as is Cabaret, as the passive support for other characters. In England, he has played Romeo, Hamlet, and Cyrano, and since then has made his belated but well-received Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams's two-character play Out Cry. Born in 1942 in the village of Fulmer, he was the son of a serving RAF officer, and later businessman, whose wife was six years older. He showed an early gift for acting, which was fed by the Oxford University Dramatic Society and developed professionally in the Dundee Repertory, then seen to flower modestly in Olivier's National Theatre. York made an early transition to film, first appearing in Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew, Harold Pinter- Joseph Losey's Accident, a 13-part BBC-TV version of The Forsyte Saga, and again with Zeffirelli in his gloriously mounted Romeo and Juliet as fiery young Tybalt. York married young, to Pat McCallum, an American photographer, honeymooned in India while serving in his first Merchant-Ivory production. After George Cukor's failure Justine, in which he played Durrell's narrator Darley, his film career crested in Bob Fosse's Cabaret, which was followed by spirited work in Richard Lester's Musketeer films and Marty Feldman's The Last Remake of Beau Geste. But what can be said of such duds as the musical remake of Lost Horizon? Perhaps York's most recent success was with Michael Gambon in the BBC-TV version of Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, with its Pinter script. York writes at leisurely length (like Cottrell on Olivier), is always affable, warm-spirited, evenhanded, seldom memorable, and never brilliant.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-68940-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
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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