An epic biography of one of America's most popular and iconographic movie stars. John Wayne, who used to boast, ``I don't act, I react,'' brought a relentless and sometimes compelling trademark sameness to almost every role in the 200 movies he starred in. The irony, as historians Roberts (Purdue Univ.) and Olson (Sam Houston State Univ.) note, is that ``he had never served a day in the military and he was America's ideal marine; he disliked horses and he was the country's favorite cowboy.'' The authors try to make the case that it was precisely because of such contradictions that Wayne was (and is) America personified. They are more convincing when they stick to the detail and circumstance of Wayne's lifewhich they do relentlessly. In fact, this is not so much a tell-all as a tell- everything biography. Still, there are fascinating digressions on the economics of B movies, Hollywood in the McCarthy era, John Huston (who rescued Wayne's free-falling career in the '30s), and so on and on. The authors are admirably restrained in psychoanalyzing Wayne, but their insights into his character are invariably shrewd and subtle. They convincingly connect, for example, his guilt over avoiding military service during WW II to his later, rabid anticommunism. They also detail at length how his personality was ultimately shaped, even absorbed, by his roles. Over the years, John Wayne the man and the actor both endured an almost ceaseless barrage of criticism, but as Roberts and Olson (who coauthored When the Domino Fell: America in Vietnam, 19451990, 1991) demonstrate, he had an undeniable ``something,'' a force, a charisma, a basic decency that still radiates in his films. Despite its occasional clunkiness, this is very likely to be the definitive Wayne biography for years to come. (38 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-923837-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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