American cinema's least Hollywood-like director never quite emerges from the shadows in this biography, but many useful career details do. LoBrutto (a film editor who teaches at the School of Visual Arts) freely admits to being ``totally obsessed'' with his reclusive subject, and his obsession shows as he traces Kubrick from Bronx child to Look photographer to London-based filmmaker famed for the vision and perfectionism of movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket. Along the way, every available fact is thrown in: not only Kubrick's school report cards (he was deemed ``unsatisfactory in social areas''), but a handwriting analysis that unsurprisingly reveals him as a ``perfectionist.'' Fans of the ``master'' (as he is sometimes adoringly called here) will enjoy the wealth of detail, some based on new interviews, some on exhaustive canvassing of previous research. But the Holy Grail—an original interview with the director—is not here, nor are answers to such personal questions as what went wrong with his first and second marriages. Most of the people interviewed know Kubrick only superficially, and are unable to offer intimate insight. In place of that, LoBrutto provides ample behind-the-scenes coverage of each Kubrick film from conception to exhibition, exploring such matters as his early low- budget ``guerrilla filmmaking,'' troubles with Kirk Douglas on Spartacus, and the use of the Steadicam in The Shining. The prose is occasionally purple or obscure (what does it mean to say ``Wartime Lies is a penultimate Stanley Kubrick project''?), and some passages are repetitive, particularly when discussing Kubrick's penchant for many takes of the same shot. But on the whole, the book is readable and informative, both for devoted fans and casual admirers. A brave, and often successful, attempt to chronicle the life of a filmmaker famous for his noncooperation with chroniclers.
Pub Date: Dec. 30, 1996
ISBN: 1-55611-492-3
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
