Like the rough draft for the real memoir, the one with a personality included.
The life and times of the novelist, screenwriter, Hollywood mini-mogul and borderline workaholic.
Sheldon came from humble beginnings in Depression-era Chicago to become the brand-name author of airport bestsellers (Are You Afraid of the Dark?, 2004, etc.). Although this memoir mostly catalogues his successes, Sheldon begins by revealing that in 1934, when he was 17 and working at a drugstore, he was stealing sleeping pills so that he could commit suicide. Despondent that his life wasn’t going anywhere, he was determined to do the deed just as his father walked in on him. A born salesman, Otto Schechtel was able to talk his son out of it, but that seems about the last positive thing he did. Sheldon worked desperately to become successful, even changing his last name at the advice of a manager, and there’s some genuinely entertaining material here covering his ascension to film- and bestsellerdom. An impressive combination of chutzpah, writing talent and blind luck led him from Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood, where he was soon knocking out B-picture screenplays. Broadway shows followed, as did A-list picture credits (he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer), and eventually Sheldon joined the ranks of megawatt producers. That whole business about his being the most-translated novelist in the world—he is listed in the Guinness Book of Records—comes later, more as an afterthought. It’s his success in the movie biz that Sheldon wants to talk about. Among other things, it’s an opportunity for name-dropping, a habit he overindulges in.
Like the rough draft for the real memoir, the one with a personality included.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53267-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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