An extremely entertaining chronicle of one of the most distinctive and absurdly gifted personalities in the history of show...
Funny-faced girl makes good: the extraordinary career of Kay Thompson (1909–1998).
Hollywood director and producer Irvin presents the life of Thompson with vigor and dash befitting his larger-than-life subject. She was a singer, songwriter, arranger, vocal coach and author, best remembered today for her Eloise children’s-book series, an iconic performance in Funny Face (1957) and as the godmother and muse of Liza Minnelli. Born Catherine Fink in modest circumstances in St. Louis, Mo., the precociously talented Thompson wasted little time shedding her Midwestern roots and taking her rightful place in the world of show business, forging a successful career singing on the radio before winding up at M-G-M as the studio’s in-house vocal arranger and coach. From the start, Thompson was too intelligent, too iconoclastic, too demanding…too much, and her wildly innovative artistry and eccentric hauteur prevented her from ever truly breaking through to a mass audience. However, those traits endeared her to Hollywood royalty and made acolytes of the likes of Judy Garland, Lena Horne, and Frank Sinatra, all of whom were coached by Thompson. Irvin charts Thompson’s dizzying successes (a nightclub act with the Williams Brothers that broke attendance records and convulsed audiences to the point of hysteria) and crushing failures (a control freak and egomaniac, Thompson repeatedly shot herself in the foot, turning down offers or leaving projects that failed to meet her impossible standards) with rollicking humor and infectious enthusiasm. The story of Thompson’s Eloise franchise—the author had honed the character since childhood, and frequently startled peers by lapsing into the moppet’s inimitable patois—is as fascinating as her performing career, and equally frustrating, as her abominable treatment of her collaborator, illustrator Hilary Knight (Thompson’s need for sole credit bordered on the pathological), casts a bit of a pall over those effervescent little tomes.
An extremely entertaining chronicle of one of the most distinctive and absurdly gifted personalities in the history of show business.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7653-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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