An affecting narrative of two top-notch English actors, of interest to specialized American readers who find the milieu...
Devoted personal remembrance of the author’s tumultuous 28-year marriage to the brilliant, troubled British actor who died, at age 60, in 2002.
A well-know actress in her own right, Hancock was born on the Isle of Wight in 1933, nine years before the man who would become her second husband in 1974. Thaw came from working-class Manchester and never quite recovered from the early desertion of his mother. He and Hancock both trained at the prestigious, competitive Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and enjoyed illustrious separate careers. Thaw kicked off with the Royal Shakespeare Company and understudied Lawrence Olivier in 1962; he was best known in England as star of the long-running TV series Inspector Morse. The statuesque Hancock, who describes her career as “a fearful hotch-potch of the serious and trivial,” gained her best part as Madame Ranevskaya in the National Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard and was the RSC’s first female artistic director. Her memoir offers a lively testament to the changing times, from the swinging ’60s (when she wore a full-length red-fox coat and popped uppers and downers), through the violent ’70s (she grew politically active and befriended Germaine Greer), to the grim Thatcher years (obsessed with “ratings and budgets”). She first met Thaw in the mid-’60s, when he played opposite her in So What About Love? He was a hard drinker and a workaholic, often dogged by depression; Hancock frankly acknowledges that she thrived on the volatility of being with a drinker. Separated at one point, the two happily reconciled, until cancer weakened and destroyed him. The narrative is peppered with entries from Hancock’s diary of Thaw’s last days, and a concluding chapter recounts her attempt to find his lost mother. Though it vividly depicts numerous famous friends, such as Peter O’Toole, the essence is its loving, sentimental portrait of a close marital bond.
An affecting narrative of two top-notch English actors, of interest to specialized American readers who find the milieu compelling.Pub Date: March 2, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-417-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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