The little tramp takes some hard, muddy pratfalls in this masterful portrait of the artist as a swine. With anyone as well-chronicled as Charlie Chaplin, a new biography must pass the strictest tests of originality. Does it say something new or recast what is known in a different light? Milton (Loss of Eden, 1992, etc.) meets these criteria and more in this major reevaluation of a filmmaker whose one saving grace was his ability to make people laugh. His squalid London childhood was appalling—poverty, a mentally unstable actress mother, an absent alcoholic father. Chaplin got out as soon as he could, finding unexpected success as a music hall pantomime performer. Though Hollywood was eager to have him, he made little mark in his first few films. Then he created his ``Tramp'' character—the absurd mustache, the bowler and cane, the uneasy mix of pathos and buffoonery—and became a star of almost unimaginable proportions. Fame is rarely ennobling, but with Chaplin it offered too many opportunities to indulge his weaknesses. He pursued women— especially teenagers—obsessively; he cheated friends, cheated the IRS, stole ideas, supported unpleasant causes. All of this had little effect on his movies; perhaps it was even the wellspring of his talent, until he succumbed to the comedian's fatal temptation of taking himself seriously. Milton is particularly devastating in her analysis of how his films turned from ingenious slapstick to leaden, Stalinist posturings. Diagnosing the dead is always an iffy proposition, but she also makes an excellent case for Chaplin having been afflicted with manic-depression. Certainly, this would help explain his innumerable inconsistencies as well as his wild mood swings in which bursts of activity were followed by idle, sullen stretches. Despite the profusion of negatives, this is not a hatchet job. Rather, Milton presents a complex, insightful portrait of a man in whom genius and iniquity were inseparably combined. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017052-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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