Rich character study of homosexual film-director Cukor, famed for his handling of actresses, by McGilligan (Robert Altman: Jumping off the Cliff, 1989, etc.). A Hungarian-American Jew with no interest in Judaism, Cukor spent his professional life fearful of exposure as a gay—though nearly everyone knew that he was one. In his early years in the theater, as a stage director in Rochester and on Broadway, homosexuality was commonly accepted, although in the 30's Cukor tried in vain to have the ``moral turpitude'' clause removed from his MGM contract. The 40's and 50's found gays less accepted and Cukor's fears justified. Only once did scandal brush him, when he and a fellow gay looking for rough trade were mugged by sailors—an incident hushed up by MGM. Cukor was famed for lavish parties and the quiet Sunday get-togethers of his ``chief unit,'' or old-time gays. He resisted any deeper feelings about sex, always paying off his young men in cash, even into his 80s. On the other side of his double life, he was the only gay film director of major rank. His career included discovering Katharine Hepburn, with whom he made ten films; directing Garbo in her greatest film, Camille, and possibly her worst, Two-Faced Woman; directing Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, Marilyn Monroe in Let's Make Love and her tragically ill-fated Something's Got to Give. Gable had him fired from Gone with the Wind, claiming he couldn't work with ``a fairy.'' Cukor's other classics included David Copperfield, Jean Harlow's Dinner at Eight, Ingrid Bergman's Gaslight, and Hepburn's The Philadelphia Story, among many others. The past recaptured, keenly and zestfully. Not to be missed. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05419-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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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