A comprehensive look at Chaplin the man but lacking as a portrait of the artist and his legacy.
The life of a great filmmaker and lousy human being.
Ackroyd (Three Brothers, 2014, etc.) delivers a thorough if ultimately unsatisfying portrait of Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) in this dispiriting chronicle of an artistic genius and thoroughly unpleasant man. The author’s account of Chaplin’s difficult early life in the slums of London is evocative and moving, detailing the many deprivations suffered by the young Charlie, which included chronic malnutrition and stints in workhouses; more troubling still was the condition of his mother, a failed singer whose devolution into madness ensured a lifelong lack of emotional stability for her gifted son. Surprisingly, the narrative becomes less interesting as Chaplin achieves success and renown, as his background in mime, dance and acrobatic clowning coincided with the nascent demands of early film comedy. Chaplin’s physical gifts and iconic visual presence as his signature “Little Tramp” character quickly established him as Hollywood’s biggest attraction, and his subsequent total control over his projects resulted in phenomenally successful movies (including City Lights, Modern Times and The Great Dictator) that made him the most famous man in the world. Ackroyd’s analysis of Chaplin’s evolving screen persona and obsessive attention to details provides some intriguing insights into his many classic works, but the author neglects to place these films in a wider context. The man himself emerges as a bitter, hateful presence: cruel, sadistic, bullying, a sexual predator fixated on very young teenage girls and monomaniacal to the point of monstrosity. Readers are left with an understanding of Chaplin’s background, the biographical details of his long and troubled life, and some idea of the hellish conditions on the exacting filmmaker’s sets, but conclusions about his significance as an artist, his work’s relationship to the culture at large, and the internal forces that engendered such personal misery and creative transcendence fail to cohere.
A comprehensive look at Chaplin the man but lacking as a portrait of the artist and his legacy.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0385537377
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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