A cross between a family memoir written in the sunset of life and a faded Hollywood Babylon: a search for the mother of Cecil B. DeMille’s youngest son. Following a quick survey of generations of de Milles and of Richard’s youth and young adulthood, the mother mystery begins with a 1955 revelation. Until then, the 33-year-old Richard knew no parents but his adoptive ones, Hollywood royalty Cecil B. and Constance DeMille. Upon the death of his uncle, director and playwright William de Mille, Richard learned that William was in reality his father and that his mother was long-deceased scenarist Lorna Moon. Richard’s decades-long investigation into his past revealed Moon to be a Scottish-born woman, originally named Helen Nora Wilson Low, who became a bestselling author. He also uncovered the elaborate maneuver that made him an orphan and William’s brother Cecil his adoptive father, and how Lorna left two other children (Richard’s half-brother and half-sister) behind to seek fame in Hollywood. Despite the wealth of rare detail (e.g., Cecil’s dalliances and physical attributes; young Agnes de Mille’s demeanor), the book leaves no aftertaste of titillation. Instead there is gravity, particularly in the author’s final reflections on his sparkling, driven mother and the plain declaration of his purpose for the book: “to tell a true story about some people who are gone . . . whose lines crossed one afternoon to produce their chronicler.” De Mille, whose long career has included science fiction writing and television directing, also reveals a mature understanding, concluding that his life was probably better as it was than as it might have been. But the book’s sobriety has limits. Those interested mainly in Hollywood tales or the de Milles may find Low-family-related chapters overreported. Further, the author’s emotional balance, seemingly natural to his age and disposition, lacks passion.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-21757-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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