Fans of Reynolds and Fisher should be pleased by this satisfyingly rich look at their lives, in which the shocking bits are...
In an even-keeled and affectionate memoir, the son of Debbie Reynolds and brother of Carrie Fisher looks back on a life with two feisty women, who died within a day of each other in December 2016.
Raised by a mother who was equal parts workaholic and alcoholic, and who was fiercely dedicated to her children, Fisher—a director, cinematographer, and producer—and his sister grew up in a household with servants to spare. It was a place where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were apt to drop by for cocktails and elephants were brought in for birthday parties. Once, Reynolds allowed Todd to bring an entire Western city stage set from the MGM lot, where it was about to be bulldozed into oblivion, and reassemble it in the backyard so that he and his friends could shoot Westerns. The good times came to an end when Reynolds learned that her second husband, Harry Karl, had been embezzling her money and squandering it on gambling and bad investments. The author details his mother's increasingly frantic efforts to stay solvent, including long stretches of performances in Las Vegas and on Broadway, and he is as frank about her business failures as he is about his sister's struggles with mental illness and drug abuse. Cheerful and unreflective, Fisher appears to let much of the family drama wash over him without drowning in it. “If you haven't noticed, I don't spend a lot of time psychoanalyzing things,” he notes. The book, which the author describes as “a long love letter and thank-you note to the two most pivotal, extraordinary women I've ever known,” is thoroughly illustrated with family photos.
Fans of Reynolds and Fisher should be pleased by this satisfyingly rich look at their lives, in which the shocking bits are always mitigated by love and understanding.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279231-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
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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