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THE MAN WHO 'FRAMED' THE BEATLES

A BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD LESTER

Yule has written better-than-average lives of Al Pacino, Sean Connery, and David Puttnam, among other works; here, Richard Lester only seems a lesser figure until you weigh his full plate of achievements. Lester (b. 1932) broke into entertainment in Philadelphia in 1951 at WCAU-TV, where he mounted five shows daily, including a personal failure featuring himself whose reviews begged for the show's death. Philadelphia offering little future, then, he took off for England, fell in with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, fresh from radio's The Goon Show, and directed them in a new TV show, Idiot Weekly, whose surreal comedy lifted English reviewers into ecstasies. This was followed by A Show Named Fred, then by Son of Fred—which failed because Milligan had gone overboard with minimalist sets and lost the audience. But Lester showed he could deliver amazingly funny film with the 11-minute classic The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film and the full-length musical It's Trad, Dad!—two films that induced the Beatles into accepting him as director of their first film, It's a Hard Day's Night, and then of Help! Yule has much fun showing Lester improvising on the script and the Beatles inventing much of their material—George Harrison actually wrote, ``What do you call that haircut?'' and John Lennon's reply, ``Arthur.'' Later, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum let Lester work with Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, and Buster Keaton, and was followed by the hilarious How I Won the War (featuring John Lennon), the San Francisco farce Petulia, and The Three Musketeers and its sequel. We watch him film Robin and Marian, Superman II, Superman III and still another Musketeers sequel. Also included is the script for a scene written for Paul McCartney but then deleted from the final cut of A Hard Day's Night. A running, jumping biography that never stands still except for a final interview with Lester, now much more cautious about his projects.

Pub Date: March 21, 1994

ISBN: 1-55611-390-0

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Donald Fine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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