A well-researched and thoroughly entertaining dual biography.
A filmmaker and screenwriter’s biographical account of two 19th-century theater divas and their fabled feud.
As Rader (Mike Wallace: A Life, 2012) notes, before the rise of French acting superstar Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) in the 1860s, popular theater was little more than a vaudevillian “social experience.” Actors earned neither money nor respect for their work. Bold and charismatic, Bernhardt took the “highly stylized” art of acting, which portrayed archetypes rather than real human beings, to a level never seen before. Her efforts and her eccentricities—e.g., traveling with a pet alligator and sleeping in a coffin—along with her scandalous affairs, earned the French actress wealth, fame, and legions of adoring fans all over the world. While the world reveled in the on- and offstage antics of “The Divine One,” Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), an actress 14 years Bernhardt’s junior, was gaining national attention in Italian newspapers. The flamboyant Bernhardt’s temperamental opposite, Duse gravitated toward naturalistic stage representations and portrayed her characters as “multidimensional, shaded, and complex” figures. Duse first saw Bernhardt appear in an 1882 production of her signature play, La Dame aux Camélias. Enchanted by the older actress’s talent and success, Duse made Bernhardt her role model. As critics across Europe began to take positive notice of Duse’s revolutionary acting methods, they also began to critique Bernhardt for her “dated style.” Soon the two divas began poaching plays, playwrights, and even lovers from each other. Before Bernhardt was able to perform playwright Giacomo Giacosa’s rendering of La Dame on Broadway in 1891, for example, Duse performed Giacosa’s translated version for Italian audiences first. Several years later, Bernhardt took poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio—whom Duse adored like no other—as her lover. Delightfully readable and informative, Rader’s book examines a rivalry that defined modern theater while also exploring the origins of modern celebrity culture.
A well-researched and thoroughly entertaining dual biography.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3837-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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