Life with Barbra, when she was Barbara, from the former boyfriend who helped set her on the road to fame and fortune. Though Streisand has tended to slight the efforts of those who shaped her early career, she has all but ignored actor and scriptwriter Dennen. However, playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, it was Dennen, apparently, who encouraged her to pursue singing when she was focused exclusively on acting, who pushed her to audition, who urged her to treat songs like compact dramas, who taped and critiqued almost every performance. In short, he did everything except teach her to sing. When they first met, brought together in a forgettable play, Streisand was still in her teens and Dennen not much older. Both of them were desperately, and usually unsuccessfully, pursuing the lights of Broadway. It was one of those meetings that create show-biz history. She brought raw, unburnished talent; he brought an unrivaled knowledge of show tunes and great chanteuses backed by a huge record collection, and he had a high-quality tape recorder. Although Dennen had doubts about his heterosexuality, the two soon became lovers. It lasted a little more than a year, falling apart just as Streisand's career really began to take off. Streisand fans will find much of this story familiar, but they will surely be delighted with the details and insights Dennen provides. He is a graceful writer, though his camp sensibility can border on clichÇ; despite some frank, even harsh appraisals, he sometimes swoons vapidly: ``If you met St. Peter at heaven's gate and he asked you what good you had done . . . I would say, `I helped give the world Barbra Streisand.' '' A full and rare look at Streisand before she disappeared into a fog of myth and publicity. (14 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1997
ISBN: 1-57392-160-2
Page Count: 281
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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