Tarquin Olivier's second book, first published in Great Britain, follows his The Eye of the Day (1964—not reviewed). Here, he hopes to set the record straight, especially about canards passed on by Donald Spoto, Thomas Kiernan, and a round dozen Olivier biographers whose works succeed and add to each other, Tarquin says, with ever more rarified but unforgivable garbage—such as the notion that Olivier had homosexual ties with Kenneth Tynan and Danny Kaye (a tale for which Spoto gave no references), or that the lesbianism of Olivier's first wife and Tarquin's mother, Jill Esmond, occasioned her distancing herself from Larry. ``This is a book mainly about Jill, Larry, Vivien and what it was like to grow up among them,'' Tarquin tells us at the start of his very personal memoir. It's not a full-fledged biography—and leaves out most of Olivier's marriage with Joan Plowright and many of the works of his later years—because Tarquin and his father (rarely close) really became friends only in Olivier's middle age; then when Tarquin married and Olivier remarried, they parted for 17 years, coming together again only when Olivier needed his son in America during the filming of The Betsy. All told, it's a rather sad book that never fudges about Olivier's pathetic self-involvement and general lack of love and givingness. His big love was Vivien Leigh, while his autobiography, written in choleric old age, draws a veil over the actor's heartlessness in racing home from the set of Fire Over England, smelling of his love scenes with Vivien, to attend Jill's accouchement with Tarquin, and the next day bringing Vivien to visit Jill. Choice all the way and filled with unpublished letters from Larry to Tarquin, Jill, and others that reveal a charming but guilt-ridden Olivier.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-7472-0611-2
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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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