Self-indulgent, highly anecdotal memoir from the actor best known for the television series Kung Fu. Carradine inherited the performing gene; by the time of his birth on December 8, 1936, his father, John, was already a successful character actor in the movies. John left David's mother when the boy was six, creating two alcoholic, dysfunctional families between which David shuttled until he was old enough to create his own troubled environment. Carradine is frank about his drug use and drinking as well as his several marriages and many liaisons, most notoriously a quintessentially '60s union with actress Barbara Hershey that produced a son they named Free (the boy, understandably, later changed his name to Tom). He says little of interest about his career, which hasn't been especially dazzling in any case—though from the author's self-important pronouncements you'd never know that he'd been in one hit (Kung Fu), one artistic success (the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory), and string of trashy exploitation films. Despite the countercultural trappings, in recounting his adventures Carradine favors the a-story-for- every-occasion approach beloved by actors for centuries; for someone who took as much LSD as he did, he's remarkably unintrospective. A few token anecdotes involving such bigger names as Bob Dylan seem to have been tossed in for commercial purposes, though his comment about Ingmar Bergman is mildly amusing (``It's hard to describe what it was like to work for Ingmar . . . the closest I can come is to say that [it] was exactly like being a character in an Ingmar Bergman movie''). Another problem is Carradine's delusion that readers will be as fascinated by his life's trivia (including mediocre song lyrics and descriptions of various cars) as he is. A few good stories, but in general the titular adjective is all too apt: endless, indeed.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-885203-20-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
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