by Anupama Chopra ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2007
A neat encapsulation of an amazing career.
The unlikely rise to fame of one of India’s biggest movie stars, contextualized by the evolution of the Bollywood film industry.
After digesting Chopra’s (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, 2003, etc.) book, few readers will be in doubt that Shah Rukh Khan chose the correct line of work. Khan’s life story is full of all the drama, tragedy and seemingly insurmountable hurdles that populate his movies, and Chopra infuses the pivotal moments of his life with an edge-of-your-seat tension worthy of the best Bollywood blockbusters. Khan began as a disciple of perhaps the most famous of all Bollywood stars, the ruggedly good-looking Amitabh Bachchan. But compared to Bachchan, Khan was a reckless, disheveled rogue whose career choices and lifestyle marked him as a rank outsider. As Chopra chronicles Khan’s improbable rise—first in television, then in film and finally as a jack-of-all-trades entrepreneur—she occasionally dips into wider developments in Indian culture. The Americanization of India is given ample coverage, and Chopra writes at length on how marketing, and branding (one chapter is titled “Brand SRK”), took a stranglehold on both Bollywood and society as a whole. She also looks at how the mob put increasing pressure on Indian businesses through extortion rackets and murder in the late 1990s, eventually infecting Bollywood through the presence of notorious mobster Abu Salem, who practically forced Khan into hiding. This signified the beginning of a bleak period for the actor, as it coincided with various failings in his businesses and in his on-screen career—and the events provide a real cinematic twist, allowing Chopra to muse on her fallen hero’s dark days, which are, of course, tempered by an inevitably triumphant comeback with the movie Devdas. Chopra offers a solid entry-level introduction to both Bollywood and one of its biggest stars. The only flaw is the lack of detailed interview material with its primary subject, but this is nicely counterbalanced by the author’s musings on wider developments in Bollywood.
A neat encapsulation of an amazing career.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-446-57858-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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