An illuminating look at one of the true greats, full of humor and intelligent analysis—highly recommended.
Portland Oregonian film critic Levy (The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa, 2005, etc.) reckons with the life and work of one of the last great Hollywood icons.
Newman (1925–2008), notes the author, was well-loved for his waggish, self-deprecating charm, his philanthropy and his longtime marriage to actress Joanne Woodward. Of course, the actor also fascinated with his preternatural physical beauty, a fact that haunted him throughout the course of his career and, Levy suggests, was a key factor in his approach to his craft. Newman couldn’t claim credit for his naturally athletic physique or piercing blue eyes, but he could take satisfaction in diligent study and old-fashioned hard work. He was not an obvious natural talent in his early forays into the field—begun while a student at Kenyon College—but rather a beautiful, magnetic charmer, a dilettante reluctant to join his family’s prosperous sporting-goods company. That he achieved his status as a master film actor is a testament to sweaty, unglamorous effort and a mania for rehearsal and script analysis, fed by his participation in the Actors Studio. It often drove collaborators to distraction but slowly paid off in a series of indelible roles in films such as The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963) and Cool Hand Luke (1967). Levy charts Newman’s evolving screen persona, from brash, cocky callowness to irreverent roguishness to gravelly authority, but the author is equally interested in Newman’s storied auto-racing career and philanthropic enterprises, including his charity gourmet-food business and his Hole in the Wall Gang camps for seriously ill children. This industry and energy, along with the boyish love of pranks and dirty jokes, the compulsive self-puncturing of his legend, the devotion to Woodward and the stubborn integrity all reveal an unusually integrated personality so ineffably right for his métier that mere mortals could only look on in wonder and delight.
An illuminating look at one of the true greats, full of humor and intelligent analysis—highly recommended.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-35375-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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