Film critic Weddle's first book is a comprehensive, if somewhat overwritten, biography of a legendary Hollywood maverick. Sam Peckinpah's (19251984) career is yet another monument to the destructiveness of the Hollywood machine and the self- destructive tendencies of alcoholics. As Weddle tells it, Peckinpah's early life inculcated in him a macho obsession with guns, booze, and a certain self-conscious toughness, all of which was filtered through an artist's considerable sensitivity. His best films are poised on the cusp between those two poles, a reflection of his need to please both his tight-lipped lawyer father and his overprotective, hysterical mother. Out of that crucible emerged a brilliant but tormented filmmaker who repeatedly drank and fought himself out of work. On the other hand, as Weddle's account makes clear, Peckinpah's stern sense of artistic integrity, combined with his penchant for on-the-set improvisations, made him somewhat ill- suited for the rigidity of Hollywood filmmaking, even after the studio system had all but collapsed. Weddle has interviewed over 100 family members, friends, and colleagues of Peckinpah's and read extensively in his diaries and papers, and the research shows. On the other hand, his writing is often turgid, filled with overextended metaphors. His critical judgments are sometimes debatable (how many film historians would agree with him that the '60s are the most interesting decade in American film?), but the production histories of films like The Wild Bunch and Major Dundee are exemplary. Finally, as Peckinpah's career begins to founder on the rocks of booze and cocaine, Weddle seems to run out of steam. Never less than interesting, this volume makes a nice complement to Marshall Fine's Bloody Sam (1991), drawing on some new sources and adding to the picture of a troubled and troublesome artist.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8021-1546-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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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