MacRae tells of life with her glamorous husband, the alcoholic singer/gambler Gordon. Sheila and Gordon, who married young, were known for years as ``The Malted Milk Kids'' because of their clean living. A relative of famed actress Madame Sarah Siddons (in All About Eve, cunning Anne Baxter receives ``the Sarah Siddons award'') and renowned Shakespearean John Philip Kemble, Sheila gave up a promising acting career when she married Gordon and gave birth to four children. Gordon thought himself the world's greatest singer but turned down a career in grand opera to triumph in musicals, his greatest role being Curly in Oklahoma. Somewhere along the line, he picked up a drink, took to gambling, made nuttily huge bets on the turn of a card, and brought down the IRS on his and Sheila's heads. Bit by bit, Gordon fell apart. Sheila joined him in a lounge act but often had to go on alone or call in a celebrity replacement. At last, on the advice of Lucille Ball, Sheila separated from Gordon but for five more years could not commit herself to divorce. She found herself being talked into bed by JFK and later LBJ, and refused on both occasions, but apparently did become lovers for a long period with Frank Sinatra, who wanted to marry her, and with an anonymous ``Jewish Prince of Comedy.'' Meanwhile, Gordon tried AA, dropped out, but nonetheless wound up on the National Council on Alcoholism while maintaining—even on his deathbed—that he wasn't an alcoholic. Sheila went on to become the last Alice Kramden when Jackie's Gleason's Honeymooners became a TV musical series. Familiar but readable operatics among the supertalented and well paid as Sheila, here writing with veteran Jeffers (Who Killed Precious?, 1991, etc.) seeks her identity. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-112-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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