The second half of Powell's autobiography, like the first, shows the British filmmaker to be an exceptionally fine writer. Powell takes up the story where the first volume (A Life in Movies, 1987) left off, just after Powell and his partner, screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, had reached the top of the British film heap with The Red Shoes in 1948. In the second volume, sadly, things begin to fall apart for the Archers (as their film company was called). Unpleasant, even disastrous, involvement with Hollywood producers Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick result in a string of flops. Although they recoup with the enormous commercial success of The Battle of the River Plate (1956), the partnership dissolves. Powell goes on to make Peeping Tom (1959), a masterpiece that enrages the critics with its violence, scaring the distributor into virtually suppressing the film. Powell goes to Australia, where he makes two successful films and jump-starts a moribund film industry. After that, however, the book becomes a depressing catalogue of projects not realized as onetime friends shun a filmmaker who they feel has grown too old to employ. As in the first book, Powell offers splendidly vivid descriptive writing, ruthlessly honest self-evaluations, and generous and evocative portraits of famous men and women as varied as Frederick Ashton, Alexander Korda, Thomas Beecham, Jennifer Jones, and Selznick. Unfortunately, Powell died after completing the first draft of the book and his widow, film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, appears to have been reluctant to allow much tampering with his final work. As a result, the book occasionally rambles and sometimes reads like transcribed dictation (which much of it is). On the other hand, some of Powell's digressions are as fascinating as the story from which they divert us. A book of charm and panache, this is a lovely legacy. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43443-7
Page Count: 612
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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