Reading to savor.
Distinguished celebrity biographer and Vanity Fair contributing editor Bosworth (Marlon Brando, 2001, etc.) recounts the life story of an American icon in all its heady—and at times, unabashedly scandalous—glory.
Ten years in the making, the book is based in exhaustive and meticulous research as well as a friendship the author began with Fonda in the late 1960s when they were both students studying at the Actors Studio in New York. Bosworth divides Fonda’s life into five distinctive stages, naming each after the “archetype” Fonda embodied during those phases: daughter, actress, movie star/sex symbol, political activist and workout guru/tycoon wife. With consummate skill and insight, the author follows Fonda through a childhood that included tortured relationships with an emotionally unavailable father, Henry Fonda, and a troubled mother who committed suicide at age 42. As young adult, Fonda’s dynamism drove her toward defining herself as an actress-artist (rather than her father’s actress daughter). At the same time, a need for quasi-paternal control caused her to fall into Svengali-like relationships with men—most notably, director Roger Vadim and activist Tom Hayden. In the early ’70s, Fonda’s rebelliousness caused her to move toward the political left and speak out against the Vietnam War. As a way to help fund Hayden’s political ambitions, Fonda began a workout studio in the ’80s that evolved into a multimillion-dollar industry. No longer the sexpot, she was now an Academy Award–winning feminist-actress who took pride in “empowering women to be in charge of their bodies.” Bosworth’s coverage of Fonda’s apparent backslide into the Stepford-esque wife of media tycoon Ted Turner is not nearly as in-depth as that she gives to the other phases of her colorfully tumultuous history. But this does not take away from her total effort, which is as epic as the life she chronicles.
Reading to savor.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-15257-8
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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