Here’s a blockbuster romance waiting to be filmed: Beautiful, gifted Italian immigrant turns Soviet spy and is loved by Edward Weston, befriended by Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, and, after her mysterious death, mourned by Pablo Neruda. According to Italian writer and journalist Cacucci, Modotti came to the US from Italy in 1913. She was 17, strikingly attractive, and enigmatically compelling to the poet/painter whom she soon married and followed to Los Angeles. Her voluptuous figure gained her femme fatale Hollywood roles, but she abandoned cinema in favor of an intense affair with photographer Weston, who introduced her to the still camera. Modotti and Weston headed for Mexico City, where Tina involved herself in the postrevolutionary artistic and political ferment. In their circle were artists Rivera, Xavier Guerrero, David Siqueiros, and others who influenced her politics and her work. Increasingly sure-footed in her photographs of street life, she “opened the door to social documentary,” according to the author. Nevertheless, her hard-line Communist stance forced her to flee Mexico for Moscow. Giving up photography, Modotti alternated Politburo duties with political espionage, landing in Spain during the Civil War. Reassigned to the US, she was deported to Mexico, where she backed off from the Communist Party, disillusioned by the Hitler/Stalin pact and the first assassination attempt on Trotsky (then in Mexico). She died in 1943 in a taxi, en route home from a dinner party. Was it suicide or assassination? No sure answer. This biography was published in Italy in 1991 and has been translated somewhat stiffly into English by Duncan . More troubling than the stops and starts of the translation are the intermittent “you-are-there” dialogues—between, for instance, Modotti and a Mexican prosecutor, and Modotti and lover Julio Mello. Who was present to record these conversations? A life of mystery, passion, dedication, and talent that begs, “Tell us more.” (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 23, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20036-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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