Harris's account of the life of the star of such semi-memorable movies as Two Women and El Cid is a few shades more perceptive and readable than the average show-biz bio. The star cycle of female sex symbols is all too short. For 10 years, 15 if they're lucky, they reign as pinnacles of beauty and desirability. Then, they are gone. If they're lucky, they might reappear when they have reached the age to play grannies. Loren's career is an almost archetypal illustration of this sad, inevitable trajectory. Raised in utter poverty in Naples, she came of star-age at 19, in the heady days when tax breaks and tax restrictions created the multinational film and the multinational star. It was a time when foreign meant racy, and under the guise of the ``art film'' European movies thrilled American audiences with the kind of titillation they would never have countenanced in an American film. With her bold, fleshy beauty (and willingness to show cleavage), Loren quickly attracted general attention, as well as the attentions of producer Carlo Ponti. With his guidance and support, her career took off. Italy forbade divorce, but the married Ponti and Loren were soon living together. Through any number of infidelities and purported infidelities—all round—they have stayed together, eventually marrying as laws were liberalized. Harris (Audrey Hepburn, 1994, etc.) capably chronicles all these colorful goings-on without neglecting the movies themselves, of which some were great successes, while many more sank. Ultimately, these bad movie choices, conjoined with age, reduced Loren to semi-retirement. However, as Harris documents, she has enjoyed a second career as pitchwoman for her own brands of perfume and eyeglasses. And now the grandmother roles are just around the corner. For those still fascinated by the Academy Awardwinning Italian actress, here are all the essentials and a little bit more. (40 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-80273-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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