Dignified, useful history, especially of Vladivostok’s evolution from shantytown to modern port.
Four generations of Yul Brynner’s enterprising family thrive and prosper from Switzerland to Vladivostok to Hollywood.
The author is the star’s son by B-movie actress Virginia Gilmore. Rock Brynner moved from chess prodigy and child mascot of his father’s rat-packing to hippie rock-’n’-roller, alcoholic and thriller author (The Doomsday Report, 1998, etc.) before embarking on deeply reflective research into his family’s roots in Vladivostok. There he unearthed the fascinating story of patriarch Jules Bryner, born near Geneva in 1849, who struck out to make a maritime fortune in the trading houses of Shanghai and Yokohama, then moved to the Russian frontier port of Vladivostok to seek opportunity in developing a town that would become “Ruler of the East.” An important naval outpost, Vladivostok grew with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and soon Bryner & Co. became a hugely successful enterprise. Jules, now a rich, established philanthropist, didn’t let the fact that he had a wife and family in Japan stop him from marrying a Russian girl and fathering numerous children. The narrative follows the perilous navigations of his second son, Boris, through the shoals of Revolution and Soviet perfidy. Branded bourgeois by the Bolsheviks, family members were imprisoned or forced to flee abroad. Boris married an opera singer; their son Yul (with an n added to the family surname) made his way as a Gypsy guitarist and trapeze artist in Europe, forging important contacts in Paris with Jean Cocteau and Mikhail Chekhov. He found defining roles on Broadway, from Lute Song with costar Mary Martin to The King and I, which brought him movie stardom as well. Contrary to the advice of his agent, he shaved off his already thinning hair to achieve the bald crown that made him famous. His son does a proficient job of soberly presenting the family saga, including, but not fawning over, its Hollywood episodes.
Dignified, useful history, especially of Vladivostok’s evolution from shantytown to modern port.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 1-58642-102-6
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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