A largely toothless and perfunctory look back at an extraordinary career—it may be cool to not give a damn, but here it...
Jock, joke, movie star, centerfold: the many lives of Burt Reynolds.
Reynolds is a true movie star of the old school, a figure of tremendous charm and charisma. Unfortunately, these qualities do not extend to Reynolds the memoirist, as this desultory account of his life and career fails to evoke the sense of roguish fun so familiar from his many appearances on talk shows over the decades. With the assistance of Winokur (The Big Book of Irony, 2007, etc.), who also co-authored James Garner’s memoir, Reynolds dutifully sketches his early life as if checking items off a list, only perking up when discussing the peccadilloes of his football chums. While this material demonstrates some level of engagement, it’s a bit like suffering through a narcissistic stranger’s tales of schoolyard glory. Reynolds structures the book as a collage, forgoing a strict chronological narrative to offer chapters on specific people and experiences that have most deeply affected his development. The best of these is an extended reminiscence of the filming of Deliverance, a landmark film and his professional breakthrough; the author’s account of the filming is entertaining and insightful. Mostly, though, Reynolds regards his career with a self-deprecating shrug. He declines to dish much dirt, despite his longtime status as tabloid scandal–fodder (ex-wife Loni Anderson comes in for some mild criticism), preferring to extoll the virtues of the likes of Dinah Shore, Jon Voight, Johnny Carson, Bette Davis, and others in the most generically positive terms. Missing are the caustic wit, effortless magnetism, and bracing go-to-hell attitude that made Reynolds such a potent cultural presence in his prime. His remarks about Boogie Nights, the late-career film that revived his reputation and earned him an Oscar nomination, are telling: he didn’t get it and didn’t like it.
A largely toothless and perfunctory look back at an extraordinary career—it may be cool to not give a damn, but here it makes for an uninvolving reading experience.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17354-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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