Eyman marshals thousands of facts, and dozens of opinions, with brio, wit and authority to create a monument worthy of the...
Acclaimed Hollywood biographer Eyman (Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, 1999, etc.) tackles his most ambitious subject: the mogul of moguls who ran MGM.
To Esther Williams he was God, to producer Michael Balcon “the unspeakable Mayer,” to Montgomery Clift a gangster on a throne. Yet the real reason it’s hard to take the measure of Louis B. Mayer (1885–1957) is not that people held such dramatically different opinions of him, but that so many people were in a position to have opinions at all. The job Mayer held for most of his working life as head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (his name was added a year after the studio was formed in 1924) brought him into contact with everyone who was anyone in Hollywood. The story of his workaholic life is the story of MGM’s most successful, indeed only successful, quarter-century, and of the talented specialists who worked for him: production chief Irving Thalberg, designer Cedric Gibbons, producer Arthur Freed. Most are long gone, but Eyman has talked to over a hundred who aren’t and supplemented their memories with exhaustive archival research. The result is less a year-by-year chronicle of the legendary mogul’s life than a biography of Hollywood’s grandest studio during its grandest era. Though Eyman is scrupulously fair in documenting Mayer’s “pit-bull aggressiveness mixed with a placating neediness,” he defends Mayer against the charges of vulgarity and philistinism, pointing out that MGM’s most characteristic films (Grand Hotel, The Wizard of Oz, The Human Comedy, An American in Paris) have dated more obviously than their counterparts at Paramount and Warner Bros. because they spoke more precisely to the audience of their time.
Eyman marshals thousands of facts, and dozens of opinions, with brio, wit and authority to create a monument worthy of the greatest studio head of them all. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-0481-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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