A frank celebrity memoir with good intentions but awkward execution.
Longtime character actor Pantoliano, known for memorable roles in films such as Risky Business, The Matrix, and Memento, and an Emmy Award–winning turn in The Sopranos, writes about his lifetime struggle with depression and substance abuse.
Known to friends and fans as “Joey Pants,” Pantoliano wrote about his upbringing in 1950s and ’60s-era Hoboken, N.J., in a previous memoir (Who’s Sorry Now: The True Story of a Stand-Up Guy, 2002). Here he focuses on his later life and career, which was profoundly affected by his undiagnosed depression, likely inherited from his psychologically abusive mother. Much of the memoir dwells on Pantoliano’s drunken escapades and fights through the years, his large sexual appetite and, later, addictions to Vicodin and Xanax. In one memorable passage, he gargles with water from a bar toilet after projectile vomiting—just one of several references to vomit and other bodily fluids. Pantoliano largely comes off as having been a selfish, undependable and unpleasantly needy person throughout much of his life, and it can make for rough reading. The book is also hobbled by odd, playlet-like fantasy sequences (including a conversation between Pantoliano and Sigmund Freud), celeb-bio clichés (“I had developed a habit...that when things were going good, I went out of my way to foul them up!”) and an unfortunate affection for exclamation points. On the plus side, Pantoliano is admirably open about his history of depression and his recent work to lessen the disease’s stigma and help others with similar conditions.
A frank celebrity memoir with good intentions but awkward execution.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60286-135-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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