Gracefully written, keenly observed, Fruchter’s portrait limns the joys of friendship and of lives devoted to art.
Musician and journalist Fruchter recalls 15 warm, happy years with actor/musician Dudley Moore.
How refreshing that “Intimate” in the subtitle of this show-business memoir refers not to sensational revelations, but to personal, often tender recollections the author shares about her subject. Fruchter does relate that Moore seduced women, suffered four troubled marriages and was uncircumcised—the latter, however, noted only because he and Fructer considered producing a documentary about circumcision. Otherwise, Fruchter offers a charming, endearing account of Moore’s work as an actor and musician. A former music critic for the New York Times and an accomplished pianist, Fruchter first spoke to Moore by phone for an article she was writing in 1987. Drawn together by their love of music, they eventually met for lunch, the first of a series of witty, sometimes loopy conversations they shared—many of which Fruchter reconstructs here in delightful detail. Soon, Fruchter and Moore toured the world in a series of classical concerts. Along the way, turbulence from Moore’s fourth marriage unnerved the actor, making his Platonic relationship with Fruchter, married and the mother of four, a tranquil refuge. Late in the ’90s, Fruchter observed Moore falter as pianist (“My fingers feel like sausages,” he complained). His speech began to slur and he often lost his balance, misleading many to think he was just like Arthur, the alcoholic title character of his most successful film. Ultimately, Moore was diagnosed with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, an incurable, degenerative neurological condition. Fruchter and her family drew close to Moore, as does the reader, following their visits to a cabin in Nova Scotia, Moore’s farewell journey to England and his heartbreaking demise in 2002.
Gracefully written, keenly observed, Fruchter’s portrait limns the joys of friendship and of lives devoted to art.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-09-190080-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ebury Press/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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