A diverting ancillary note to heavier biographies.
The star of such films and TV shows as A Kiss Before Dying and It Takes a Thief revisits the architecture, fashion, restaurants and pastimes of Hollywood’s golden age through anecdotes and personal memories.
With veteran biographer and film historian Eyman (Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille, 2010, etc.), with whom he collaborated on his previous memoir (Pieces of My Heart, 2008), Wagner presents a brisk account of early Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, their surrounding neighborhoods and the silver screen notables who frequented them, including James Cagney, Gloria Swanson, Frank Sinatra, James Stewart and many others. Topical chapters provide generous vistas on a world marked by exclusivity. The author dedicates a substantial, meticulous chapter to houses and hotels, with emphasis on the home of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Pickfair; Rudolph Valentino’s Falcon Lair; the Beverly Hills Hotel; and similarly iconic structures. Tracking the shift from a pre-1929 “architecture as entertainment” perspective to a less opulent style, Wagner enlivens many sites and landscapes that have largely disappeared. For dedicated movie buffs, a handful of choice remarks on the personal habits of stars provides respite from tedious details. Other chapters consider facets of privilege, from a preference among certain male stars for English-inspired wardrobes to the nightlife of the times. A few mild, curmudgeonly laments on current realities—such as paparazzi swarms, the bottom-line nature of moviemaking and an increasing informality that sharply contrasts with bygone glamour—underscore the actor's nostalgia for the studio days, yet they stop short of idealizing; he briefly acknowledges the industry's later midcentury problems. Ultimately, the book is a charmed and mostly charming tribute to off-screen lives during a period many may regard as Hollywood's finest.
A diverting ancillary note to heavier biographies.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02609-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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