Next book

VIVIEN LEIGH

AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT

A worthy tribute to an eternally fascinating star.

Sumptuously illustrated life of one of stage and screen’s greatest tragic figures, published in time for the centennial of her birth.

Vivien Leigh (1913–1967) will forever be associated with two milestone, Oscar-winning roles in film: Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Both happen to be larger-than-life Southern belles, but Leigh was, of course, British (born and raised in India during the Raj period) and fervently patriotic about it. A woman of strong ambition and will, once she decided, as the young wife of a magistrate, that it was the actor’s life for her, her ascent to stardom was rapid. The catalyst for her rise was a passionate love affair with another ambitious young actor, Laurence Olivier, who would become her husband within a year of her triumph as Scarlett and whom she regarded as both mentor and the love of her life. Leigh began with limited talents (a weak, high voice and little experience and training), but she was determined to keep pace with her husband, whether playing opposite him or in roles of her own choosing. Most critics thought she succeeded admirably in the theater and on film, but she let the cruel dismissals of Olivier-worshipping critic Kenneth Tynan get under her skin. Though hardworking by nature, she was prone to both physical and mental illnesses, from manic depression, which ultimately alienated her from Olivier, to tuberculosis, which killed her prematurely at age 53. First-time author Bean tells Leigh’s story affectingly, aided by access to personal letters from the principals and the memories of some of her closest friends.

A worthy tribute to an eternally fascinating star.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-7624-5099-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Running Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 10


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 10


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview