A comprehensive look at one of American acting’s neglected Grand Masters.
A serious, if quasi-hagiographic, biography—the first—of the famously powerful and charismatic actor.
British film critic Hutchinson (Horror and Fantasy in the Cinema, not reviewed) is a friend of Steiger’s, and his narrative reflects this—for while he addresses Steiger’s wilderness years and encounters with depression, this is not an unvarnished portrait. What emerges is a sympathetic close look at the actor’s larger-than-life personality and seemingly star-crossed career. Steiger never knew his father and grew up chafing under his increasingly alcoholic mother, then found escape serving on a destroyer in WWII. Drifting into the Civil Service, he joined a drama group to meet girls, then studied acting with Erwin Piscator at the New School; he later was drafted into the Actor’s Studio, where he was schooled in the “Method” of naturalistic, inner-directed acting (regarding which Hutchinson takes a leisurely detour). His professional career took off gradually: roles in television theater (like Paddy Chayefsky’s groundbreaking Marty) led to triumphant films like On the Waterfront—and crucial missteps like Oklahoma (which he felt typecast him as a villain). His personal affinity for Steiger aside, Hutchinson provides telling portraits of a mid-century New York (where television and theater were innovative and infused with talent) and of the reckless creative spirit behind early TV and such films as The Pawnbroker. The author also examines the long period when health and circumstance led Steiger to act in many films that were below the standards of his peak performances, and includes a brief but intense selection of Steiger’s poems and a lengthy interview with Steiger (taken from a 1992 event at the National Film Theatre in London).
A comprehensive look at one of American acting’s neglected Grand Masters.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88064-253-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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