A gripping portrait of a difficult talent.
Film historian Biskind (Gods and Monsters: Movers, Shakers, and Other Casualties of the Hollywood Machine, 2004, etc.) examines the eventful life and career of Warren Beatty, one of Hollywood’s last exemplars of old-school glamour and, evidently, as maddening an individual as ever graced the silver screen.
The author eschews delving into Beatty’s early life, beginning his narrative with the tyro’s early acting roles in theater and live television, when the actor established the twin poles of his persona—the intractable artiste and compulsive seducer of women. Restless, intelligent and secretive, Beatty wielded his charm and beauty as a weapon, using his skills in seduction to manipulate his way into stardom despite a difficult reputation and multiple flops, leaving a bloody trail of broken hearts and damaged careers in his wake. His romances with the likes of Joan Collins, Leslie Caron, Natalie Wood, Diane Keaton and Madonna echo the pattern of relationships with screenwriters including Robert Towne, James Toback and Elaine May: Beatty would charm, overwhelm and drain the object of his attentions, ruthlessly move on when it suited his agenda and yet maintain good relations down the line. Beatty’s parallel career as a political agitator bore the hallmarks of his film work—compromised by indecisiveness and ego. Biskind brings his historian’s acumen to bear on the production of era-defining triumphs like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Shampoo (1975) and Reds (1981), as well as notorious flops like Ishtar (1987), Love Affair (1994) and Town & Country (2001), and his accounts are full of juicy gossip and intriguing insights into the actor’s psychology. As a producer and director, Beatty demonstrated a compulsive nature bordering on psychosis, demanding endless takes and micromanaging insignificant details that drove his projects wildly over schedule and budget and threatened the studios that backed them.
A gripping portrait of a difficult talent.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7432-4658-3
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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