Cathartic and revelatory, Cumming’s memoir will fascinate fans and those who relate to his internal struggle.
The acclaimed actor reflects on overcoming a painful past to make room for a fruitful future.
In his moving debut memoir, Not My Father’s Son (2014), Scottish actor and activist Cumming (b. 1965) urgently confessed to growing up in a sadistically abusive family and how that experience hobbled his adult life, suppressing his emotional maturity and limiting his capacity for happiness. In this wise, pensive, sometimes chatty book, the author examines how he has been able to embrace the painful memories embedded in his “splintered psyche” in order to move forward and face further challenges along the way. He shares stories of his strained eight-year heterosexual marriage and his deep dive into early theater roles to fill the void. From there, Cumming nonchronologically glances further back into his childhood and his burgeoning love of performance and drama school. In the 1990s, British theater gave way to glittery feature film junkets and side character roles in Hollywood; he includes an expanded memory about his work with Stanley Kubrick and Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. Cumming came out in the late 1990s after a momentous Tony Award–winning performance in Cabaret and a greatly anticipated relocation to New York City. The book’s midsection is aflutter with Hollywood anecdotes of stars, dalliances, and heartbreaks over men as well as the breathless first encounter with his husband, Grant. Thoughtful, candid revelations join with intimate confessions while Cumming’s witty repartee never falters. Regardless of his traumatic past, the memoir lifts the veil on a happier man who has “transcended and bloomed.” With heartfelt anecdotes and an honest perspective, Cumming shares the struggles and joys of a fulfilling life while making peace with the baggage of a troubled past.
Cathartic and revelatory, Cumming’s memoir will fascinate fans and those who relate to his internal struggle.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-243578-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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