Engaging, warm chronological memoir of Cary Grant, assembled from his own words and those of friends and fellow actors by Nelson, who represented Grant on the lecture circuit during his last years. This is a big, solid Grant biography that towers above recent books that show the actor ingloriously as a neurotic tightwad and bisexual. Nelson met Grant while arranging for his ``Evenings with Cary Grant''—Grant made 36 such unrehearsed appearances, speaking intimately to 1,000 to 3,000 listeners and answering questions for about two hours a show, to standing ovations. While Nelson pastes together her hundreds of quotations with quiet skill, she sometimes gets things wrong, as with Grant spending heavily to track down Plaza-owner Conrad Hilton to complain about getting only one half of an English muffin—a story that makes Hilton seem cheap. In fact, Grant got three halves and explained to Hilton that he was losing good will by not offering the fourth. Grant, born in Bristol, England, as Archie Leach, left school at 13 to go on the road as a dancer-tumbler-stilt-walker-pantomimist with the Pender troupe, skills that stayed with him for life and that brought him to America where he became a Coney Island stilt-walker, then a success in Broadway musicals. His first film was a bit in Singapore Sue, but it wasn't until 1937's The Awful Truth (directed by Frank Capra) that his gift for suave farce and physical comedy set him up as Hollywood's greatest farceur. By then he'd married and been divorced by Virginia Cherrill, Chaplin's blind girl in City Lights. Among the more moving episodes here is Grant's romance with young Phyllis Brooks, whose mother dampened any wedding bells. All speak of Grant's grace, taste, generosity, great wit and style, and the smashing quotes from his ``Evenings with...'' prove every word. Forget the other books, this is it. Superb. (Sixty-eight b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-10610-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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
SEEN & HEARD
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