A unique and sophisticated understanding of Hollywood’s indispensable gay and lesbian culture.
Mann (Wisecracker, 1998, etc.) intriguingly chronicles the experience of gay men and lesbians in Hollywood during the studio era: “a haven for homosexuals, a place to thrive and, within parameters, live and work with a degree of personal authenticity.”
While the Hollywood studios from the 1920s to the ’60s were hardly committed to gay rights, writes the author in this engrossing study, they did provide a milieu in which gays and lesbians worked as actors, directors, writers, costumers, decorators, and journalists, openly during the best of times, and never less than an open secret during the bad times. Mann sets the homosexual subculture within the larger social context: the freedom of the ’20s, the crackdown by the self-appointed ethics police and the imposition of the Production Code of the ’30s, the burgeoning of a gay community and consciousness during the war years, the anti-progressive lunacy of the ’50s, and the liberation of the ’60s. Working from primary sources and thousands of interviews with gay and lesbian movie people and their families, Mann’s analysis is complex but illuminating: he is at home discussing the class (and predominantly white) circumstances of gay expression as he is with shaping the notion of gay sensibilities at work in design and costuming. He handles with ease the gay subtexts in George Cukor’s work, the tangy feminism of Dorothy Arzner, the evolution of a gay culture with its own language, customs, and folk history. He treats with intelligence and without mercy both the sorry result of Catholic reformers getting their fingers into Hollywood in the post-Prohibition years, as well as the equally pathetic reason gays and lesbians were not more prominent on the blacklists: “The discrimination gays faced at the hands of the Communist Party.”
A unique and sophisticated understanding of Hollywood’s indispensable gay and lesbian culture.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03017-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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