A competent but throwaway memoir, with possible appeal for movie-industry insiders and film buffs.
Hollywood superagent’s hubris-fueled downfall, as related by her long-suffering assistant.
Debut author Snyder describes Iris Burton as “the last of the great development agents,” the star-making virago behind the success of Henry Thomas (E.T.), Tori Spelling, River Phoenix, Kirsten Dunst and many others. Growing up in a small town in New York, Snyder always dreamed of hobnobbing with Hollywood royalty. After an internship at Warner Bros., he got an assistant job with Burton at the peak of her reign as the queen of child-actor representatives. But when Phoenix died in 1993, says the author, the end of an era was at hand. Burton became an increasingly bitter, dishonest, self-sabotaging monster. She began to care more about herself than her ever-diminishing clientele, who were steadily gobbled up by sharklike agencies such as CAA and ICM. When not on some paranoid, expletive-filled tirade, Burton filled her time with tummy tucks and liposuction. Worse, she refused to make Snyder a partner, even though he ended up single-handedly running the agency. Most notably, he placed Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Hartnett on the path to stardom. Snyder’s loyalty eventually cracked in the face of high blood pressure, migraine headaches and diverticulitis. He quit the agency, but soon came back for a few more miserable years. In Snyder’s hands, Burton is such a grotesque Hollywood cliché that she hardly qualifies as a “tragic” figure. The author fares better when he focuses on the mind games inherent in negotiating a deal or the intricacies of the Hollywood star system. When his attention turns to his life apart from Burton—specifically as a relationship-seeking gay man cruising a coldly promiscuous L.A. scene—the narrative becomes humorless and self-pitying.
A competent but throwaway memoir, with possible appeal for movie-industry insiders and film buffs.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60239-662-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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