Empty pillow talk.
A superficial biography of a major film star and icon.
Rock Hudson’s acting was nearly always wooden, though some make a case for his work in the cult film Seconds. He reigned, nevertheless, as a box-office champ for at least two decades, his handsome face and brawny chest drawing sighs on in movie palaces. Behind the Hudson phenomenon stood Henry Willson, the lecherous gay agent whose nearly evil machinations Robert Hofler reveals in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson (2005). Bret has little to add to this or any other account of Hudson’s famous life. It’s now well known that Hudson struck poses outside the gate of Universal Pictures, eventually winning bit parts, even though he fluffed lines and blew takes from day one forward—even after he became a major star in Magnificent Obsession and Giant. Hudson’s death from AIDS also capped rumors swirling for years that he was gay. Like a summer-stock actor, Bret obsesses over sleeping arrangements, the one aspect of his account that may add new but not surprising or significant details to the Hudson legacy. Rock, it seems, made out with buff blond extras who worked his films, eventually demanding them as one of his perks. Hudson also liaised with other famous, closeted actors, some of them—Troy Donahue, for example—named here, accurately or not, for the first time. On this matter and others, Bret’s sourcing is frustratingly vague. As primary sources, he lists several previously published books and some unpublished articles. He cites no references in the text and apparently did no interviews for the book. Those who enjoy seeing what someone else saw through the keyhole may not care who peeped.
Empty pillow talk.Pub Date: March 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-86105-855-1
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Robson Books/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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