by Scott Eyman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2014
Insightful, exhaustive and engrossing—a definitive portrait of the man and the legend.
A comprehensive and compelling examination of The Duke.
Hollywood biographer Eyman (Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille, 2010, etc.) goes beyond a mere cataloging of film credits and biographical highlights to illuminate the process that transformed Marion Morrison (1907-1979) into cinema’s most enduring symbol of masculinity, John Wayne. The poor son of a diffident man and a difficult mother, Wayne enjoyed social success in his school career due to his good looks, winning manner and athletic prowess. However, after an injury ended his football scholarship at the University of Southern California, he angled his way into a job as a prop boy at various movie studios. His commanding height, strength and graceful bearing were noted by director Raoul Walsh, who cast him in a small role, which led to a mostly undistinguished career cranking out generic, low-budget Westerns for Poverty Row studios such as Monogram and Republic. Eyman vividly evokes the humiliation and difficulty of those years in the trenches, where the canny Wayne devoted himself to learning every aspect of moviemaking and performing effectively for the camera. When John Ford gave Wayne his big break in Stagecoach (1939), the actor was ready. Eyman devotes much attention to the complicated but rewarding relationship between Wayne and Ford—the two would partner on an astonishing number of classic films—which would cement Wayne’s image in the public mind as film’s pre-eminent avatar of American manhood. Wayne’s personal life was as full of incident as his roles, including a tempestuous series of marriages, a long-term affair with screen siren Marlene Dietrich and controversy surrounding his conservative political views. Throughout, Eyman portrays Wayne as a man of hidden dimensions: a regular guy who liked to smoke and drink with his buddies and who was also a formidable chess player; a controlling figure on the set also capable of tremendous kindness and generosity; and an untrained actor who mastered the art of film performance.
Insightful, exhaustive and engrossing—a definitive portrait of the man and the legend.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9958-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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