Merry Memoirs by Hollywood director Fleischer, helmsman of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Boston Strangler, Fantastic Voyage, Doctor Doolittle, Mandingo, Compulsion, and 43 other films. Lighthearted takes on tough moments fill the standout pages of Fleischer's 77 years in the flicks. He was born (in 1916) to the movies, his father being the celebrated animator Max Fleischer, who gave film life to Betty Boop, Popeye, and many other memorable screen characters. Dad's great black beast in the industry was Walt Disney, who later offered the author the job of directing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea—which Fleischer could accept only with his father's blessing. Among the many wonderful moments rendered here are the wrestling with the mechanical problems of Jules Verne's giant squid—as well as with Orson Welles in the full tide of his ego (he later apologized to Fleischer for his blowups). Quite moving is the death of Edward G. Robinson, who, at 80, filmed the last frames of his career—his marvelous death scene in Soylent Green—under the author's direction. Fleischer limns the immense ego of 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, for whom he worked many times, who's shown with slimy cigar and brown-stained teeth, marching about giving orders. Kirk Douglas, star of the Verne vehicle, as well as of one of Fleischer's best films, The Vikings, also gets rapped (and forgiven) for rampant egoism, while Howard Hughes—then head of RKO—remains an idiotic perfectionist and yet has an adventurer's winning glow. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Rex Harrison, and Charlton Heston all have their moments center stage as well. Women—never great power-wielders in Fleischer's heyday—get little play here. Top-flight tales from a director modest about his works and days.
Pub Date: July 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-88184-944-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
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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