A warm tribute to a rather bossy know-it-all companion in arms who was hugely talented and fiercely devoted.
An adoring biography of Nora Ephron (1941-2012) explores her motivations as a writer and a feminist.
Washington Post columnist Cohen (Israel: Is It Good for the Jews?, 2014, etc.) first met Ephron in 1968 through their mutual friend Post journalist Carl Bernstein, who became Ephron’s second husband. Their friendship deepened and lasted more than 40 years, until her death by cancer, an illness largely kept secret from her other friends and the public. In this gracious, elegant eulogy to his friend, Cohen endearingly suggests that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, feeling his way as he goes along, sounding other friends and acquaintances for memories. He reveals charming vulnerabilities about Ephron as well as traits, such as her evident delight in name-dropping and hanging with the A-list, that don’t necessarily make her lovable to readers. Ephron was, above all, a fearless writer, from her college years at Wellesley to her early elbow-sharpening jobs at the New York Post and Esquire, where there were few women mentors and she learned to write fast and sharp amid a newsroom of rough-and-tumble men. She was feared for her frankness, and her targets included Bernstein, skewered in her biting post-marriage sendup Heartburn (both book and film). Ephron’s segue from screenwriter to director seemed natural, as she had been studying at the feet of friend Mike Nichols since their collaboration on Silkwood. Her film Sleepless in Seattle would became a kind of schmaltzy classic; ditto You’ve Got Mail and her final screenplay, Julie and Julia. Cohen captures a brilliant woman full of contradictions: she was a “girlie girl” and homemaker, queen of dinner parties and also a fierce feminist, yet insecure about her looks, the size of her breasts, and her inevitable aging neck—all of which she examined in her provocative writing.
A warm tribute to a rather bossy know-it-all companion in arms who was hugely talented and fiercely devoted.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9612-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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