The sad story, well and respectfully told, of an American original struggling with procrustean politics, timorous producers...
A veteran biographer of film legends records the sad career arc of Nicholas Ray (1911–1979), the director of one of Hollywood’s most iconic films, Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
McGilligan (Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only, 2007, etc.), who has also written biographies of directors Altman, Cukor, Hitchcock and Eastwood, plunges into Ray’s majestic and messy story with his customary assiduousness, creating a clear and balanced portrait of a most complex man. Born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in Wisconsin, Ray soon drifted toward community theater, then radio, then the leftist, experimental theater that flourished in his youth. One of his teachers in Chicago was Thornton Wilder, and Ray, who soon moved to Hollywood, seemed to have met and befriended (and often betrayed) just about every showbiz notable in the third quarter of the 20th century, including Elia Kazan, John Houseman, Gloria Grahame, Howard Hughes, James Dean, Joan Crawford, Natalie Wood, John Wayne, Richard Burton, Gore Vidal, Charlton Heston and myriad others. He was, temporarily, an acolyte of Frank Lloyd Wright and worked with Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger and others in the folk-music scene. Although he never had total control of a film, he still directed about 20, including some that appear on critics’ lists of notables—including They Live By Night, In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground, Johnny Guitar, King of Kings and others. His serial womanizing and several marriages (well chronicled here), his struggles with alcohol and drugs, his gambling addiction and his incessant tinkering with scripts all soon made him persona non grata among producers.
The sad story, well and respectfully told, of an American original struggling with procrustean politics, timorous producers and personal demons.Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-073137-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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