As good an insider’s view of middle- to late-period Kubrick as there is.
A fly-on-the-wall view of the movie business as conducted by a highly eccentric director.
Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) was not much interested in understanding the details of modern life; he didn’t do his own shopping, sent others on errands, had artisans make him storage boxes and shirts, and knew nothing about how to fix such things as a printer without toner or a crashing computer. “It’s true,” writes D’Alessandro, Kubrick’s former personal assistant. “Stanley knew absolutely nothing about these frustrations, but it wasn’t a question of class. It’s because all he had to do was call Emilio.” An Italian expatriate in England at the turn of the 1970s, the author opens with the story of him turning down a job offer from John Wayne only to go to work for a rather helpless Kubrick in the uncertain business of moviemaking. His duties grew proportionally, and soon, by D’Alessandro’s account, he was part of the director’s daily routine. Indeed, the author is not shy of taking credit where Kubrick did not specifically give it to him for such things as suggesting the incidental music (“an orchestral piece featuring a French horn, an instrument that I had always liked a lot”) for The Shining and chasing down camera equipment that figured in Kubrick’s still and film photography. D’Alessandro is matter-of-fact and not boastful about these contributions. Just as much of his work involves negotiating a diplomatically delicate middle path between Kubrick and his wife, Christiane, in endless arguments over what to acquire and what to throw out, a case in point being “thousands of beeswax candles” specially made for Barry Lyndon. The book is funny and casual throughout. Of special interest are D’Alessandro’s set notes, revealing, for example, that the cat lady room in Clockwork Orange figured two decades later in Eyes Wide Shut.
As good an insider’s view of middle- to late-period Kubrick as there is.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-669-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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