A very good memoir, and with the right cast, its movie version would be even better.
A memoir that recalls a gifted but troubled youth’s first love in the brutal setting of a psychiatric ward.
McBride (Hawks on Hawks, 2013, etc.) follows his past biographies of Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, Howard Hawks, and Frank Capra with this unsparing account of a mental and spiritual breakdown he suffered as an hard-driving, highly devout Catholic senior at Marquette University High School in Milwaukee in the mid-1960s. At his nadir, he says that he was broken almost beyond repair. But he was saved, he writes, by an even more troubled but remarkable fellow inmate—a half-Irish, half-Menominee woman named Kathy Wolf. His love for her made him whole, he says. Eventually, McBride recovered and took early steps in a highly successful career as an American film historian, screenwriter, and film professor at San Francisco State University. However, he felt a certain ambivalence about the erratic Wolf and let her slip out of his life, even as she sank lower. At its core, this novelistic memoir acknowledges McBride’s debt to Wolf, who, as she later told him, gave him not just her body, but her soul. McBride is a masterful writer who’s very much at home with profanity-laden dialogue, although his quoted conversations with Wolf and others from a half-century ago seem more like screenwriting than recollection. In addition to his sympathetic rendering of Wolf, his highly detailed recollections of sexual repression and the abuse that he says he suffered during his strict Catholic education will resonate with readers who’ve had similar experiences. His narrative also shows a way forward for readers who’ve been touched by mental collapse.
A very good memoir, and with the right cast, its movie version would be even better.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-943784-12-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hightower Press, Berkeley
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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