Drawing from his many years of radio as well as some early magazine pieces, Terkel (Coming of Age, 1995, etc.) looks at his first loves, film and theater, as explicated by some of their most famous creators. One of the best parts of visiting or living in Chicago is hearing Terkel’s radio program, a beacon for how intelligent, compassionate, and interesting talk radio can be. Terkel, who has dabbled in acting himself, is as fascinated by the art and craft of acting as he is by the many crafts explored in his classic Working (1974), a book to which he compares the current one. Terkel is the kind of guy who, by his own admission, is as riveted by watching a talented short-order cook juggle burgers as he is by a Eugene O’Neill play, and he brings that seemingly endless wide-eyed enjoyment to these interviews. The book has some wonderful moments. A ruthlessly frank Agnes De Mille talks about the difficulty of being taken seriously as a choreographer in the early days of her career and about the shock of seeing modern dance for the first time (“Our eyes were innocent”). Marlon Brando, reluctantly plugging his latest film, The Ugly American, begins to interview Terkel. Arthur Miller admits that his original ambition was to be a Russ Columbo’style crooner. And when the book is focused on craft, it is riveting. Unfortunately, Terkel is a bit more awed than usual by his interview subjects and some, like Federico Fellini, really don’t have much to say. The result is a bit disappointing, with gems scattered amid too much dross. A regrettable oddity—a Studs Terkel oral history that has dull patches.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1999
ISBN: 1-56584-553-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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