Journalist and novelist Mann (The Men from the Boys, p. 669) nicely probes the American century's shifting mores in this biography of the nearly forgotten silent-film star William Haines. Haines's lifelong refusal to hide his homosexuality is the central theme here. Born in 1900 in small-town Virginia, he ran away from home at the age of 14 and opened a dance hall (possibly a gay brothel) in the nearby brawling factory city of Hopewell. Soon he arrived in Greenwich Village, where he befriended struggling show people, including Jack Benny and Archie Leach—the future Cary Grant and one of several gay actors whose efforts to conceal their sexuality Mann cites in sad contrast to Haines's forthrightness. Modeling work led to a screen test and relocation to Hollywood, where there wasn't yet much stigma against homosexuality—even he-man homophobe Clark Gable apparently had a romantic escapade with Haines. In 1926, Haines achieved stardom and fell in love with sailor Jimmie Shields, who would remain his companion until Haines's death in 1973. The actor developed a flippant ``wisecracker'' personality for the fan magazines in order to deflect attention from his failure to romance starlets: ``Wisecracking allowed him to walk the line,'' Mann notes. His close friendships with William Randolph Hearst and Joan Crawford were balanced by MGM boss Louis Mayer's moral disapproval, which was evidently the main reason for the cancellation of Haines's contract in 1933, even though in 1930 he had been the industry's top male star in box-office receipts. Haines thrived for 40 years in his second career, as an interior decorator; commissions from movie stars and, later, high-profile clients like Walter Annenberg and then-governor Ronald Reagan made him wealthy. As attitudes about homosexuality changed, Haines never hid his relationship with Shields and apparently rarely suffered for it. Insightful, packed with entertaining gossip, and an illuminating reminder that knee-jerk homophobia has not always been the American way.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-87155-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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