A superbly wrought, aesthetically and psychologically acute portrait of Welles's sheer, undisciplined genius. The first of a projected two volumes, this biography takes Welles to the grand old age of 26 (where other talents usually begin their ascent to fame and fortune) and the release of his masterpiece, Citizen Kane. But what seemed like one more triumph in an ever more brilliant and audacious career was really a cresting of the flood, and the years to come, despite occasional squalls of genius, would be a sad, slow ebbing away. As Callow (Charles Laughton, 1988, etc.) notes, Welles had ``created a body of work in several media that he would never surpass: in the theater, in radio, in book illustration, in film.'' Welles was an awesomely precocious child. Even when he was a preschooler, most adults who encountered him, from preachers to postmen, felt certain he was destined for greatness. Some of this precocity was certainly due to Welles's ambitious, demanding mother. Her death when he was nine left him with a driving and lifelong sense of guilt and constant need to prove himself. Like its subject, this biography occasionally tends to flabbiness. Callow particularly overdetails Welles's substantial juvenilia (i.e., his accomplishments before he was 17). But rarely, perhaps not since Franáois Truffaut's book on Hitchcock, has an arts biographer possessed such a professional and intuitive understanding of his subject. Callow, a British actor (most recently in Four Weddings and a Funeral) and sometime director, offers innumerable hard-won insights into Welles's artistic processes, dissecting them with a careful, revealing hand, guided by his actor's eye for psychological underpinnings. His research is effortlessly vast, and Callow corrects many of the myths and dissemblings surrounding Welles, some of them put out by Welles himself. And this is all accomplished in a highly literate, epigrammatic style that makes this biography a sumptuous pleasure to read. A masterful effort. It will be a hard, fidgety wait for the second volume. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86722-5
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
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