Admitting that she has been obsessed with Brando since she was a teenager, Mizruchi paints a sympathetic and respectful...
According to his latest biographer, Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was a voracious reader, social activist and insightful actor.
Mizruchi (English/Boston Univ.; The Rise of Multicultural America, 2008, etc.) bases her study on considerable new sources: Brando’s huge library of annotated books, film scripts and research notes, as well as interviews with friends and family members. “I can report,” she writes, “that Brando’s hunger for knowledge was as insatiable as his more legendary appetites for women and food.” She believes that Brando was a victim of sexism; his good looks and gossip about “the endless women and romantic affairs” led to his being stereotyped as an intellectual lightweight. Mizruchi argues that he was a serious student of philosophy, literature, history, and Western and Eastern religions. In the 1950s, as his reputation was established by performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront, his reading became “focused on three main areas: comparative philosophy and religion; Asian cultures, including their histories, languages, and arts; and social scientific theory (politics and psychology in particular).” His readings, Mizruchi asserts, influenced his choice of roles, in which he hoped to convey some social or political message. Although he was chided for outspoken political views that some deemed naïve, the author claims that Brando consciously “treated his celebrity as a means to public ends.” His causes included Native American rights, civil rights for African-Americans, UNICEF and the environment. Mizruchi chronicles Brando’s career, highlighting his deliberations over roles, his profuse annotations of scripts and his efforts to deeply understand his characters. Even when he took parts just for the money, “Brando sought to balance lucrative projects against those he did for idealistic purposes.”
Admitting that she has been obsessed with Brando since she was a teenager, Mizruchi paints a sympathetic and respectful portrait of a man far different from the self-absorbed, self-indulgent one who emerges in other biographies.Pub Date: June 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08286-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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