As cluttered as the contents of a traveling player’s trunk, but every bit as revealing and charming.
A veteran actor of stage and screen rehearses his long personal and professional life, often with humor, rarely with rancor.
Plummer, who will turn 80 next year, moves swiftly through his privileged Canadian boyhood, pausing to recount some anecdotes with whimsy before arriving at the genesis of his long affection for the stage, especially the classical theater. (He performed most recently at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 2008). Sprinkling his text sometimes too liberally with quotations from favorite scripts and writers (often Kipling, a lifelong love), Plummer pulls few punches. He admits, perhaps too gleefully, that his early-career tomcatting and carousing resulted in two divorces—oddly, he chides his second wife for her drinking—but speaks with pride about his third marriage, which has lasted four decades. He has hard words for very few in his profession—generally directors who didn’t get it—and sings the praises of numerous colleagues, including Jason Robards, James Mason, William Hurt, Boris Karloff, Raymond Massey and, more recently, Russell Crowe and Diane Lane, with whom he did Must Love Dogs (Plummer does, by the way). Readers may have some trouble figuring out when exactly he met these folks, as pages go by without any hint of a date. Although he admits to having accepted some unfortunate movie and TV roles merely for the money, Plummer also recounts instances when he turned down film offers to do classical theater. He played all the great Shakespearean roles—in Canada, on Broadway, in England—and writes most excitedly about his success with Cyrano (1973). The insouciant raconteur virtually ignored his daughter, actress Amanda Plummer (product of his brief marriage to Tammy Grimes), until she was an adult, but says they’re now close. He also claims to have lived in an actual haunted house.
As cluttered as the contents of a traveling player’s trunk, but every bit as revealing and charming.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-679-42162-7
Page Count: 660
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
