Dishy, and substantial, contribution to film history, and to studies of the unfortunate McCarthy era.
Politics, paranoia, and preening stars: a sometimes funny, sometimes rueful memoir of filmmakers in exile during the McCarthy inquisition.
Barzman, a columnist for the late Los Angeles Herald Examiner and screenwriter, opens her account on a sweet note of revenge: her successful organization of a protest at the 1999 Oscar ceremonies against lifetime-achievement honoree Elia Kazan, who had infamously named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee half a century earlier. Only a third of the audience applauded Kazan, she reports (by way of eyewitness and pal Sophia Loren); Charlton Heston and his clique clapped, though the television cameras made it seem as if the protestors were fewer in number. Barzman had reason to be annoyed at Kazan; it was through his testimony and that of a few other turncoats that her husband, the celebrated screenwriter and playwright (and onetime Communist) Ben Barzman, earned a spot on the blacklist and had to remove himself and his family to Europe in order to find work. Not that exile was all bad: Barzman’s crowd included the likes of Loren and Pablo Picasso (and even Heston, whose vehicle El Cid Barzman scripted, without credit). Still, it had its cost: Ben Barzman grew increasingly depressed at being away from the Hollywood scene, and Norma took out her frustrations in a marriage-damaging affair or two. Honest and self-critical, Barzman has a nicely sharp tongue, and she gets in wounding digs at a number of targets, not least of them John Wayne (“a feudal lord surrounded by a permanent retinue of a dozen technicians, makeup, wardrobe, and lighting pals who went wherever he went”) and Richard Nixon—whom, she suggests, wasn’t above taking a payoff to keep a suspected pinko off the Hollywood dishonor roll.
Dishy, and substantial, contribution to film history, and to studies of the unfortunate McCarthy era.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-466-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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