Given its origins in material no one wanted published while they were alive, it’s unsurprising that this is a thoroughly...
Celebrity biographer Spoto settles scores, rehashes feuds and reevaluates reputations in his third addition to the Hitchcock shelf.
The author launched his career with two major works on the director: The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976), a critical study, and The Dark Side of Genius (1983), a biography. This coda reconsiders the master of suspense against recollections that interviewees requested remain unpublished until they or Hitchcock died. Spoto frequently displays ill humor toward his sources speaking from beyond the grave. He is no longer spellbound, for example, by Joan Fontaine. In The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, he lauded her acting in Rebecca as “extraordinarily delicate and fragile.” Now he finds it “a successful example of a one-note performance,” makes a gratuitous reference to her failed marriages and unfavorably compares her acting to that of sister Olivia de Havilland, with whom Fontaine feuded for years. Spoto also snipes repeatedly at Patricia Hitchcock, a vocal critic of his biography of her father. He chides her as “acutely unaware of the constant connection that invariably must exist between the storyteller [in this case, Hitchcock] and his story,” and then condescendingly terms her “denial” of this link as poignant. Balancing the negatives, Spoto delivers encomiums to Ingrid Bergman, Teresa Wright and Grace Kelly. The author remains steadfast in the belief that Hitchcock was a major filmmaker, but insists he was not the sole auteur of his films, praising the contributions of the director’s collaborators. As for the dark side of Hitchcock’s genius, Spoto paints it in even darker hues. Tippi Hedren recalls her discomfort with the director, to whom she was under exclusive contract for seven years. Besides subjecting her to five days of physical and psychic harm in an attic setting for The Birds, Hitchcock stalked her and eventually demanded she grant him sexual favors, she claims. When Hedren refused, the director threatened to destroy her Hollywood career.
Given its origins in material no one wanted published while they were alive, it’s unsurprising that this is a thoroughly nasty reunion.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-35130-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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