Welles rightly imagined that people would never stop writing about him after he died. Callow continues to set the standard...
Juicy, provocative latest installment in the comprehensive life of a self-destructive genius.
In his first two volumes of the life of Orson Welles (1915-1985), actor and author Callow captured the scope of a life that always seemed to promise more than it delivered. In The Road to Xanadu (1996), Welles was the boy genius whose Midas touch literally transformed theater, radio, and then film, reaching the pinnacle of his life at the age of 25 with Citizen Kane. In Hello, Americans (2007), Callow charted the way down, exploring how Welles’ sprawling ambitions ran up against both studio interference and his own restless inability to see projects through to the end. During the period recounted here (1947-1964), Welles fell into the pattern of his adult life: constantly trying to get a new play or film off the ground and taking acting jobs to help finance them. The results were ridiculously mixed, with success and failure jostling each other from year to year. Welles made quirky box-office duds (Othello, Mr. Arkadin), staged an ambitious version of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and got fired by Laurence Olivier. He also made a classic film noir, Touch of Evil, and a long-gestating masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight. Welles thought of himself as Falstaff, but he seemed a good deal closer to King Lear: a royal in exile, howling at the winds as well as actors, crew members, studio heads, and anyone who crossed him. He was, also, a paradox to the critical establishment: a failure to his countrymen, a hero to the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd. Callow, with his own extensive theatrical background, remains Welles’ most astute observer, with an unerring sense of both his subject’s brilliance as a visual artist and the comparable limitations of his (often hammy) performances.
Welles rightly imagined that people would never stop writing about him after he died. Callow continues to set the standard in this increasingly crowded field.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02491-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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