Sometimes there are pressing reasons to publish a work posthumously. But sometimes, as with this slim collection of autobiographical fragments and deeply felt pet anecdotes by a talented actress, the reasons for publication are less compelling. Although she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress early in her career (for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), as well as two Tony Awards for her work on stage (including best actress, for her role in A Thousand Clowns), Dennis's true calling was apparently as an animal lover, a role in which she displayed substantial and ceaseless talent. Piecemeal fashion, she recounts here how, over the years, she took in any number of dogs and dozens and dozens of cats, most of them strays and foundlings. Even when she was touring with a production, a few more cats would find their way to her and be added to the mÇnage. Like all true pet lovers, Dennis was endlessly tolerant as furniture, drapes, even telephones suffered the onslaught of so many capering claws. Every meal was a desperate defensive action. Water pistols worked for a time, but eventually a dog ate the pistols and Dennis was forced to give up meat: ``Even then all was not safe, as there seemed to be a growing number of vegetarian and pasta groupies among the carnivores.'' The non-pet portions of this book are almost exclusively childhood memories. Though precise and visceral, they read more like method acting memory exercises than cogent narratives. Much of this book was written while Dennis was dying of cancer, which does give the writing the strong emotional overlay of promise unfulfilled. Despite the editor's best efforts to weld these disparate fragments together, they never really cohere into anything more than a series of precious, pointillist moments. (23 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 27, 1997
ISBN: 1-57601-001-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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