A brisk and often funny style and a talent for catching his subjects off-guard with unexpected questions make for...
Two decades of celebrity profiles for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and other magazines.
Celebrity worship is a two-sided thing. The media delight in making celebrities into larger-than-life figures, but it finds as much, if not more, enjoyment in cutting them down to size, demonstrating that for all their fabulousness, stars are just as prone to selfishness, irresponsibility, or stupidity as anyone else—though admittedly on a bigger scale than the rest of us. People in search of major dirt may find Zehme’s subtitle somewhat misleading, for while many of his profiles are undeniably comic, few major indiscretions are detailed. Indeed, for the most part, the author takes an affectionate, even protective attitude toward his subjects, though it’s couched in a breezily irreverent style that deflects any charges of outright sycophancy. He may poke gentle fun (carefully noting the length of the pauses in his interview with the notoriously evasive Warren Beatty, for instance), but on the whole he’s sympathetic. Thus we find Hugh Hefner sounding like a moony teenager as he searches for a new “special lady” after his divorce; Woody Allen—his own indiscretions by then a matter of public record—bemoaning his court-ordered estrangement from his and Mia Farrow’s children; Madonna dodging paparazzi in the wake of her breakup with Sean Penn; and so on. One of the few occasions when Zehme becomes genuinely critical is in a series of articles on the behind-the-scenes scheming that resulted in Jay Leno rather than David Letterman inheriting The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson, but even there he assigns the blame primarily to Leno’s agent and the suits at NBC.
A brisk and often funny style and a talent for catching his subjects off-guard with unexpected questions make for interesting glimpses of the real people behind their public personae.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-33374-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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