An annoying, superficial, and spiteful reductionist biography of the late Italian filmmaker. Baxter (The Hollywood Exiles, 1976) is more intent on dashing the self-promulgated ``myth'' of Fellini (192093) than on the assemblage of a creditable life story. Presented a Lifetime Achievement Oscar shortly before he died, the Italian director was a consistent prize winner in Hollywood, at Cannes, and elsewhere with such landmark films as La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8´ (1963), and Amarcord (1973). Baxter provides detailed synopses of most of the films and delves into such background material as the development of the screenplays, casting, and selection of the crew. He discusses Fellini's childhood in Rimini and youth in Rome; his early exposure to cinema and some of his influences; his career as a cartoonist/journalist; his 50-year marriage to actress Giulietta Masina (``a relationship,'' Baxter claims, ``more like brother and sister''), and his supposed jealousy of and resistance to her emerging stardom following La Strada and Cabiria; his lordly treatment of those who worked for him; and his tumultuous association with producer Dino de Laurentiis. The author also catalogues, with little amplification and plenty of innuendo, ``a parade of sexually charged images'' from Fellini's childhood and dreams, which often became manifest in his films. Throughout, there is a persistent, pointless sniping. Baxter hints that Fellini bribed his high school teachers. We learn that he didn't really run away with the circus. He notes that as a 1930s schoolboy Fellini was photographed ``smartly turned out'' in his youth group uniform, implying that this somehow negated his adult anti-fascist beliefs. Baxter goes to great lengths to point out that Fellini's distant father, dominant mother, and ``a sensitive, creative disposition'' are ``often associated with homosexuality, but there's no evidence of physical affairs.'' Utterly lacking in artistry or insight—an unbearably long, trashy tabloid article. (24 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11273-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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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