A sweeping, revelatory dual biography.
Two icons and their turbulent times.
Contemporaries growing up in Weimar Berlin, Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) and Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) both aspired to careers in entertainment: Dietrich as a concert violinist, Riefenstahl as a dancer. In her engrossing, richly detailed debut book, Wieland, a historian of political theory at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture, offers parallel biographies of the two women, tracing their vastly divergent trajectories. Riefenstahl championed Nazis and exalted Hitler, while Dietrich left Germany for Hollywood stardom. When her future as a violinist was thwarted by tendinitis, Dietrich turned to acting, where her discipline and drive overcame her “modest gifts.” “I had no special talent and I knew it. Everyone knew it,” she confessed. Nevertheless, when Josef von Sternberg saw her in a revue, he decided he had found the star of his new project, The Blue Angel (1930). She would play Lola Lola, “a sassy, savvy, honky-tonk B-girl,” a role that launched her career. Wieland documents her affair with von Sternberg and her many subsequent lovers, including Erich Maria Remarque, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Jean Gabin, American Army Gen. James M. Gavin, Yul Brynner, Fritz Lang, and John F. Kennedy. She also had an intense, though platonic, friendship with Ernest Hemingway. A beloved entertainer of American troops, Dietrich later reinvented herself as a nightclub singer, but her career spiraled downward, and she often was beset by financial worries. Riefenstahl also diverted from dancing to acting, using her training in gymnastics and boxing for roles in mountain films, popular in prewar Germany. By the 1930s, she was not only acting, but producing, directing, and writing screenplays. Hitler, she learned, was a fan “and an anti-capitalist feminist to boot.” She was entranced. Egotistical and self-promoting but nevertheless talented, Riefenstahl won accolades in Germany; managed to be acquitted of Nazi collaboration; and reinvented herself as a photographer. Wieland deftly traces both lives through their many ups and downs.
A sweeping, revelatory dual biography.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87140-336-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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