An entertaining yet predictable portrait of a flamboyantly iconic family.
A colorful history of the glamorous pop-culture icons of the previous century.
In this latest biography of the Gabors, film historian Staggs (Inventing Elsa Maxwell, 2012, etc.) attempts to “set the record straight” in portraying their larger-than-life history and the numerous legends, rumors, and scandals connected to each family member: sisters Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva, and mother, Jolie. As the title indicates, Zsa Zsa takes center stage throughout the narrative. “Clichés about this legendary family seem indestructible,” writes the author in the preface. “I hope, however, to have punctured two of the silliest. The first is that they were famous for being famous….The other outlandish notion is that they somehow foreshadowed the Kardashians and others of that ilk. This one is nourished by those who know nothing of the Gabors and too much about the Ks, not one of whom has the sophistication…of an Eva or a Zsa Zsa.” The Gabors indeed live jet-setting, productive lives and individually achieved a vast array of accomplishments in the entertainment and fashion industries. Yet perhaps their biggest achievement was one of self-invention. As refugees from Hungary landing in the United States, they carefully cultivated their mystique of glittering fabulousness and spent their lives preserving that image. Though certainly more cosmopolitan than the likes of the Kardashians, they frankly did foreshadow the glamorous lifestyles of current celebrity sensations. Ultimately, the book is an old-fashioned Hollywood biography, however respectfully eschewing the malicious Kitty Kelly style of dishing. Staggs diligently references sources and allows their personalities and escapades to come vividly to life, including their numerous love affairs and marriages (more than 20 among the three sisters) and their many career milestones. Beneath all the glitz, these were business-savvy women, and the author misses the opportunity to claim their relevance for contemporary readers, leaving them enmeshed within their long-reigning “camp” status. Theirs is an interesting, occasionally wayward American success story begging for a revisionist approach to the telling.
An entertaining yet predictable portrait of a flamboyantly iconic family.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1959-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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