A smart, engaging book for the completist that only suffers from being a touch too complete; it could have lost 100 pages...
Help us, Obi-wan: There’s a Star Wars sequel looming, and it may just feature—shudder—Jar Jar Binks.
If you’re a real fan of the Star Wars series, observes Mashable deputy editor Taylor, then you’re likely a hater, whether of Jar Jar or of “the whiny delivery of Mark Hamill” or of those damnably cute Ewoks. George Lucas has given us plenty to hate, though the spectacle of a young, bikini-clad Carrie Fisher lashed to the post is probably not one of those things, even if, in that garb, she’s been turned into a doll for sale to the perverted and the innocent-minded alike. More to the point, as Taylor notes in his opening pages, there’s scarcely a corner of the world that isn’t aware at least dimly of Star Wars; one of the series has even been dubbed into Navajo in time for one of the last of the old-time Code Talkers to see it before moving on to another galaxy. Taylor’s book feels occasionally like an assemblage of oddments and statistics, but mostly he stays right on track in charting how Star Wars moved from film to meme to near universal standard cultural referent. (Say, “I’m your father” in a James Earl Jones voice in just about any language, and the audience will get it.) Better than that is the author’s account of the origins of the series and his look at what Star Wars has wrought over the last four decades, including a true revolution in many aspects of filmmaking. If Lucas had died in the car crash he suffered in 1962, Taylor notes, then among other things, Hollywood would be “without much of a special effects industry.”
A smart, engaging book for the completist that only suffers from being a touch too complete; it could have lost 100 pages easily. Still, welcome reading for fans of Star Wars—or, for that matter, of THX 1138.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-08998-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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