The autobiography of a prominent folksinger/actor/activist of the 1950s and '60s. It's difficult to write the story of a good man, harder still when the good man is writing his own story: Bikel does not entirely avoid the pitfall of a self-congratulatory tone. Still, his is a compelling life, taking him from preWW II Eastern Europe to an acting career in Israel; emigration to England after the war, training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and initial success in British theater and film; a leap to the Broadway stage and stardom in The Sound of Music; productive years as a Hollywood character actor; a new career as a folksinger in the late '50s; then several decades of activism, as president of Actors' Equity and a prominent figure in the civil rights and antiVietnam War movements. Of late, he has made a career out of playing Tevye in many road productions of Fiddler on the Roof while guest starring in made-for-TV dramas ranging from the classy (``L.A. Law'') to the crass (``Dynasty''). Bikel has rubbed elbows with a fascinating parade of directors and actors (John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Mary Martin), singer/songwriters (Pete Seeger, Buffy Sainte- Marie, Phil Ochs, Frank Zappa), activists (Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael), and politicians (presidents Carter and Clinton invited him to the White House frequently; their Republican counterparts were, unsurprisingly, less friendly). As a performer, activist, and actor, he is a natural moderate-liberal. He seems surprised that ``folk purists'' object to his smoothing out the unusual harmonies of traditional music in his slickly commercial performances; similarly, as an early supporter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he was upset when the leadership turned increasingly radical, from ``freedom marchers...[to] freedom fighters.'' A model life for those inclined to save the Earth while strumming a guitar. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-019044-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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