A comprehensive biography that ultimately seems rather like a 400-page Cole Porter song list. McBrien (English/Hofstra Univ.; coauthor, with Jack V. Barbera, of Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith, not reviewed) enjoyed the cooperation of the Porter estate and the composer’s relatives; he interviewed surviving friends and colleagues; and he makes extensive use of contemporary periodicals and previous books about Porter. He duly collects the pertinent information and imparts it clearly, from Porter’s 1891 birth into a wealthy Indiana family to his lonely death in 1964 after 27 years of suffering from leg injuries sustained during a riding accident. McBrien conscientiously chronicles Porter’s privileged existence: undergraduate cavorting at Yale; early composing efforts; marriage to an equally affluent widow; his travels through Europe during the 1920s (when he was considered too rich to really devote himself to Broadway); and then his triumph, from the 1930s through the 1950s, as the musical theater’s smartest, sexiest, most sophisticated songwriter. This detailed narrative is long on facts and quotes but short on analysis. Attempting to understand, for example, how the Porters sustained mutual affection even as the homosexual Cole pursued men with increasing openness, McBrien settles for a friend’s reductive explanation that Linda’s unhappy first marriage had put her off sex. It’s a pleasure to read large chunks of brilliant lyrics from Porter’s astonishing array of classic songs (“Anything Goes,” “Love for Sale,” “Night and Day,” “You’re the Top,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”), but McBrien unfortunately devotes much less time to the sinuous melodies and pulsating rhythms that were equally important. His account of Porter’s decline and death acknowledges but doesn’t do justice to decades of pain borne with stoicism and style. McBrien obviously appreciates and loves his subject, but his book lacks two things needed to convey Porter’s essence: wit and rue. (72 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-394-58235-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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