A respectful overview that lets an icon of women's filmmaking emerge as a full-fledged human being, social crusader, and artist. As in My Last Days with Errol Flynn (not reviewed), which he coauthored, Donati uses abundant research to coax readers to a broader understanding of his subject—in this case, to reestablish Lupino's (191895) position as a top film actress and discuss her directorial accomplishments in aesthetic rather than gender-related terms. Born into a generations-old stage family in England, the teenage Lupino was already an experienced actress when summoned to Hollywood in 1933. The big-studio years that follow comprise some of the book's liveliest passages, partly because Lupino's star was on the rise (she earned more than Bogart in High Sierra) and partly because her Hollywood cohorts, particularly the moguls, live up to their stereotypical dazzle. Jack Warner pegged Lupino ``another Bette Davis''; Columbia head Harry Cohn pronounced, ``You are not beautiful, Ida, but you've got a funny little pan.'' Years of acclaim followed (The Hard Way, Pillow to Post), until 1947 when her contract with Warner Bros. was canceled. Over the next decade, she wrote scripts and formed a production company, Filmakers, making movies about social problems others avoided—illegitimacy, rape, polio. For two decades she was a respected film and television director (Hard, Fast and Beautiful, The Hitchhiker), hailed for her economical, fast-paced style. Throughout her life she was known for her professional largesse, giving several people an early break, notably director Sam Peckinpah. While this book enthralls with the glamour of a high-rolling Hollywood life, its restraint is refreshing. Donati treads lightly over common tell-all stomping grounds—three failed marriages, affairs, career decline, estrangement from her only child, Bridget. Ida Dearest will have to be written by someone else. A welcome, gentlemanly work on a lauded yet underappreciated figure. (24 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8131-1895-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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