The book doesn’t quite hit the insightful levels of those by Scott Eyman or David Thomson, just as the film isn’t quite The...
An everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about look at a cult movie whose reputation has grown in the four decades since its initial release.
Entertainment Weekly film critic Nashawaty (Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie, 2013) ventures that Caddyshack (1980) first took shape as a kind of lesser entry in a flurry of films born of the nexus of Saturday Night Live, the National Lampoon, and massive piles of cocaine: The Blues Brothers, Meatballs, Animal House, etc. It was also a more pointed exercise in class warfare at the outset than when it eventually emerged, many drafts later, to critical indifference. Putting on his Peter Biskind hat, Nashawaty connects this subversiveness to more serious films such as Mean Streets and Easy Rider while seeing it as a generational repudiation of comparatively treacly fare such as Clint Eastwood’s orangutan comedies and the Smokey and the Bandit franchise. Though born of the free-wheeling, madcap cohort of fledgling director Harold Ramis (who called the movie his “$6 million scholarship to film school”) and writers Brian Doyle-Murray and the doomed Doug Kenney, Caddyshack was thoroughly vetted by studio hacks—fortunately, no one listened to them. Nashawaty steers readers through now-familiar scenes, such as Bill Murray’s near-lethal wielding of a pitchfork and Chevy Chase’s suave twitting of the uber-rich Ted Knight, brought to warp speed with the arrival of Rodney Dangerfield. What is constantly surprising, and most pleasantly so, is how these scenes could have been very different had other roads been taken—e.g., had the overburdened Bill Murray not found a spare few weeks to film and not been given free rein to improvise or had the casting director been able to land Mickey Rourke in the place of Michael O’Keefe for the central (though, in the final product, somewhat diminished) role of Danny Noonan.
The book doesn’t quite hit the insightful levels of those by Scott Eyman or David Thomson, just as the film isn’t quite The Maltese Falcon. Still, Nashawaty provides an eye-opening pleasure for Caddyshack fans.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-10595-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.
An exhaustive—and exhausting—chronicle of the champ's boxing career and disastrous life.
Tyson was dealt an unforgiving hand as a child, raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in a "horrific, tough and gruesome" environment populated by "loud, aggressive" people who "smelled like raw sewage.” A first-grade dropout with several break-ins under his belt by age 7, his formal education resumed when he was placed in juvenile detention at age 11, but the lesson he learned at home was to do absolutely anything to survive. Two years later, his career path was set when he met legendary boxing trainer Cus D'Amato. However, Tyson’s temperament never changed; if anything, it hardened when he took on the persona of Iron Mike, a merciless and savage fighter who became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. By his own admission, he was an "arrogant sociopath" in and out of the ring, and he never reconciled his thuggish childhood with his adult self—nor did he try. He still partied with pimps, drug addicts and hustlers, and he was determined to feed all of his vices and fuel several drug addictions at the cost of his freedom (he recounts his well-documented incarcerations), sanity and children. Yet throughout this time, he remained a voracious reader, and he compares himself to Clovis and Charlemagne and references Camus, Sartre, Mao Zedong and Nietzsche's "Overman" in casual conversation. Tyson is a slumdog philosopher whose insatiable appetites have ruined his life many times over. He remains self-loathing and pitiable, and his tone throughout the book is sardonic, exasperated and indignant, his language consistently crude. The book, co-authored by Sloman (co-author: Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, 2012, etc.), reads like his journal; he updated it after reading the galleys and added "A Postscript to the Epilogue" as well.
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16128-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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