A gripping, intimate treatment of one of cinema’s last great iconic stars.
The life and times of the Sundance Kid.
Biographer and novelist Callan (Arise Sir Anthony Hopkins: The Biography, 2009, etc.) marshals 14 years of self-conducted interviews with the star and his associates, generous excerpts from Redford’s personal journals and copious research to compile a revealing portrait of Hollywood’s greatest golden boy, Robert Redford. The author traces Redford’s surprising past as a diffident juvenile delinquent and aspiring artist—he studied painting in Europe and initially pursued a career in animation before turning to acting. Callan dutifully details Redford’s evolution as an actor and star, but gives equal weight to his careers as a political activist for environmental causes and founder of the independent film Mecca Sundance, a spectacular parcel of Utah landscape originally purchased by Redford to protect its natural beauty. The struggling young actor couldn’t afford it but plunged ahead anyway, highlighting an ingrained stubbornness and force of will that would characterize all aspects of Redford’s life. Difficult, uncompromising, autocratic and stubborn as a pack mule, Redford comes across as both a restless egotist and a heroically ahead-of-his-time champion of sustainable ecology and artistically progressive independent film. Callan offers intriguing insights into Redford’s film legacy, limning his complicated friendship with director and frequent collaborator Sydney Pollack, his uncredited contributions to the shaping of such signature vehicles as The Candidate and All the President’s Men, and Redford’s directorial style, informed by both his painter’s training and empathy with actors. The narrative repeatedly cites Redford’s extremely precarious finances, complicated by the Herculean task of keeping Sundance viable. An all-American beautiful jock with a brutal iron will and the soul of a visionary tyrant, Redford, under Callan’s gaze, emerges as a sui generis American figure.
A gripping, intimate treatment of one of cinema’s last great iconic stars.Pub Date: May 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-679-45055-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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