The author’s writing is rough—the apt word, the eloquent phrase and a consistent tone elude him—but his perceptions will...
This critique of Day’s career shows that the major American icon was also a major American talent.
Did Doris Day, Miss Goody Two-Shoes, the constant virgin, really carve out “one of the truly great show business careers in show business history?” Skeptics, especially those who are baby boomers, will do well to consider the forthright, knowledgeable and convincing case for Day’s acting and singing that Santopietro (The Importance of Being Barbara, June 2006) makes here. Day, he reminds readers, reigns as the biggest box-office star in Hollywood history. She appeared in 39 films and released over 600 recordings. Yet her acting, the author concedes, ranged from “brilliant to awful.” He blames Warner Bros. for putting her in a series of second-rate musicals to sate audiences who, during the ’40s and ’50s, adored her as the image of can-do America. And he cites Day’s husband-manager, Marty Melcher, as also having a negative impact on her career. Yet in all the uneven work, Santopietro observes Day’s talent shining through. He admires her sharp, brightly judged performances, playing witty, forthright and, yes, sexually sophisticated women in Love Me or Leave Me, The Pajama Game and The Man Who Knew Too Much. But by the late ’60s, he concludes, younger audiences misperceived her image as chaste, compliant and saccharine, too nice for the rebellious world they made out in the streets. The star survives, the author feels, her dulcet, intimate, heartfelt singing captured in a series of LPs she recorded in the late-’50s and ’60s that put her on the shelf with Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee as unforgettable interpreters of American popular song.
The author’s writing is rough—the apt word, the eloquent phrase and a consistent tone elude him—but his perceptions will send readers to Day’s CDs and DVDs for an overdue re-take.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36263-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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