Better-than-average celebio of Liza Minnelli, by Leigh (coauthor of Zsa Zsa Gabor's zippy One Lifetime is Not Enough, 1991). Leigh works hard and avoids clichÇs but, in the end, the Liza Minnelli we see on stage or screen is the same Liza who turns up on the page. Aside from a veil over her alleged cocaine addiction (and some alleged lesbian or bisexual activities, which Leigh doesn't dig into aside from revealing the disappointment of the editors and readers of a gay magazine that interviewed Minnelli only to have her remain ``in the closet'' during the entire interview), Liza's public life is her private life. She apparently gives off fabulous vibes but is much like an imploding nova that sucks up energy and confidence from those around her. Leigh's Liza cannot bear loneliness, even for a moment. Her first 30 or more years were spent burying her legendary mother and trying to burn brightly on her own. Much of Liza's childhood was spent as mom to a suicidally nervous Judy Garland. Liza was born into the aristocracy of talent and never knew a commonplace day, with Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other titanic celebrities as her childhood party guests. She was ever the daughter of director Vincente Minnelli, and she sought substitute dads all her life. Liza made her best picture (Cabaret) too young, winning an Oscar for it, and then couldn't top herself on film—but of course became a magnificent presence and in her late 30s toured with her old houseguests Sinatra & Davis. Though Liza has no gift for marital fidelity, Leigh resists ``dirt'' and lets Liza's decades of wild partying speak for themselves via fellow partygoers. At last, Liza made the circuit of famous rehabs and A.A., and today, at 45, is sober—and brighter than ever on stage. Absorbing all the way, but remains well within its genre. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos.) (First serial to Cosmopolitan)
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1993
ISBN: 0-525-93515-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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