Not the last word but an earnest, endearing homage to an outstanding actor.
A bittersweet biography of an intensely private artist.
Unerringly tight-lipped throughout his career, actor James Gandolfini (1961–2013) exists as a kind of burly but amiable cypher who defies close examination. That he somehow managed, despite his media-shy disposition, to convince legions of Sopranos fans that they actually knew what made him tick is testament to his considerable powers as an artist. With little in the way of original source material to draw upon, Star-Ledger art critic Bischoff relies heavily on Gandolfini's impressive collection of work to help define his subject's remarkable life. What he finds, despite Gandolfini's undeniably magnetic presence on screen, is a remarkable actor who nevertheless found the process of acting incredibly taxing—and a genuinely "regular guy" who felt insecure about his craft. "About a week before a production was supposed to start filming, we'd get a letter, copied to the director, in which Jim would give everybody an out, asking them if they were sure they thought he could do the part," says Gandolfini's manager Mark Armstrong. "And he'd always include the names of three actors he thought were available who could do a better job." Bischoff makes sure to include ample insider Sopranos information, largely focusing on ever-increasing sums of money and the ensuing contract battles. However, the author shines in his behind-the-scenes explorations. In trying to divine who this intrinsically "Jersey guy" was, Bischoff reminds readers that Gandolfini passed away while vacationing with his young son and that the women he'd loved at various points in his life found it possible to sit near each other at his funeral. In his case, the absence of chatter surrounding his possible failings speaks volumes about his success as a human being.
Not the last word but an earnest, endearing homage to an outstanding actor.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-05132-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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