A worthwhile biography of a worthy subject: Paddy Chayefsky, probably the finest writer to emerge from television. The author of gossipy books about Barbra Streisand and the Bette DavisJoan Crawford feud (Bette and Joan, 1989, etc.) would seem to be an odd author to chronicle the life of a serious writer, but Considine's admiration for Chayefsky's work shines through every page of this absorbing book. Clearly bored with some of the traditional baggage of biography, Considine hustles through Chayefsky's early life in a few brief, awkward chapters. However, from the moment Chayefsky turned his hand to writing, Considine stretches out to provide richly detailed accounts of each of his productions. Chayefsky's first great success came in 1953 with his original television drama Marty, a pioneering work in the naturalistic style whose film version, two years later, brought Chayefsky the first of three Academy Awards. Considine reveals that Chayefsky had a brief affair with leading lady Kim Novak during the filming of Middle of the Night (a revelation that is too coyly teased at in the book's introduction). Career setbacks plagued Chayefsky in the '60s as he attempted to widen the scope of his work, but he staged a remarkable comeback in the '70s with the films The Hospital and Network. If Considine's book seems to cover five parts career to one part life, it quickly becomes evident that this was how Chayefsky lived. A psychological portrait emerges of a deeply divided man with an unhappy wife and a troubled son. Only after a horrible experience with what would be his last film, Altered States, did Chayefsky finally began to integrate his personality and find some peace, only to die as he turned to new work. An exceptional book that, it is hoped, will prompt a reappraisal of the entire range of Paddy Chayefsky's writing. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40892-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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