This lengthy biography of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy reveals lives as melodramatic and star-crossed as one of their movies—without the happy ending. Author Rich (president of one of four MacDonald/Eddy fan clubs still extant in the US) reveals more about the two lovers than even the most avid fan might want to know, including Nelson's descriptions of Jeanette's ``little nighties.'' The question it leaves unanswered is how the feisty soprano and the lusty baritone, certainly among Hollywood's most popular stars during the late 1930s and early '40s, managed to make such goulash of their love affair. Although both singers regularly denied it, according to Rich, they were attracted to each other from the moment they met. MacDonald was characterized as ``an ambitious career gal with a bad reputation'' and was rumored to be one of Louis B. Mayer's couch tomatoes. Mayer, in fact, frowned on the singers' relationship for professional as well as personal reasons, but cast them in Naughty Marietta, their first film together. It made the duet stars—and brought them to bed after nearly a year of stolen kisses. It wasn't romantic. In a jealous rage, Nelson raped Jeanette, according to Rich. But she forgave him, beginning a cycle of reconciliation and rejection that went on for 30 years, and included suicide attempts and miscarriages. In a rejection phase, MacDonald married actor Gene Raymond (who, she discovered, preferred men as sexual partners) while Eddy wed a possessive woman who refused divorce, in spite of his numerous infidelities (MacDonald was not the only liaison). A source for much of the material, including intimate details of the couples' private meetings, is Eddy's mother, Isabel, via her son's diaries and letters. A filmography is included. A bonanza for MacDonald/Eddy fans, a pan full of nuggets for aficionados of Hollywood and MGM, but an encyclopedic struggle for the less dedicated. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-407-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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