Houdini's fame is so great that he is more a metaphor for magical escape than a man, but Brandon's (The New Women and the Old Men, 1990) biography readably explores both his act's archetypal appeal and his obsessive personality. Born Ehrich Weiss in Hungary and raised in Wisconsin, Houdini mythologized his impoverished childhood and early career in countless interviews and publicity notices. Brandon penetrates his family's isolation in poverty, his father's failure as a rabbi in America, and his mother's Freudian bond with her favorite son. Married early, Houdini and his assistant-wife began with an unremarkable magic act, which they toured in circuses, vaudeville, and even a freak show. At the turn of the century his theatrical breakthrough came with concentrating and expanding on his original escape act—from handcuffs—and his promotional talents and showmanship brought him worldwide fame, with phenomenal success in autocratic Germany and Russia. He added constantly to his ingenious repertoire—escaping from straitjackets, immersed in water, suspended in midair, or buried alive—with an instinctual sense of the public appetite, while also writing books and dabbling in early movies and aviation. Preoccupied with spiritualism, he campaigned against fraudulent mediums and arranged experiments to make contact with his wife after his death. Invoking Freud and Jung, Brandon reveals Houdini's fixations on his mother (including impotence, in her guess), suicide, death, and the hereafter, and his act's fascination for his audience (though she ignores his influence on modern magicians like Penn and Teller). If her Houdini is shackled in Freudian complexes, though, his act was equally bound up in his obsessions. More trickily, Brandon adroitly deconstructs his secrets (available for years) but keeps the suspense and wonder intact. Apart from occasional slips into a corny carny-huckster style and insertions of irrelevant anecdotes of her own experiences, Brandon has written an entertaining biography of a legendary figure. (24 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42437-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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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