A fistful of goo.
A biography of actor-director Eastwood that’s tantamount to a puffed-up press release.
Even the most ardent Eastwood fan will sense that journalist Thompson spins every detail of Eastwood’s life and work into cotton candy. Whatever befalls the actor—a divorce, a bad review, a lawsuit—Thompson turns to Eastwood’s advantage. To critics who find Eastwood’s films too violent, for example, Thompson offers Eastwood’s reply: “I tell them to fuck off.” Thompson follows two tracks. One rehashes Eastwood’s now-familiar career: bit parts in potboiler films; TV stardom, on Rawhide; films in Italy; films in Hollywood; the forming of his own production company; his ascendancy as a major American film actor and director; two marriages, many affairs and many children. Interrupting what would charitably be described as the book’s focus and pace are long, tepid interviews with Eastwood and with longtime companion Sondra Locke, who were not quite, as Thompson suggests, the Tracy and Hepburn of their time. Throughout, Thompson’s sourcing is vague and he provides no citations. No matter, since virtually everyone quoted just loves Clint—well, maybe not Locke. The blondes that Eastwood refers to as “squirts,” “shrimps” and “spinners” love Clint when they meet him at his Hog’s Breath Inn in Carmel. Donna Mills loves Clint. Bernadette Peters loves Clint. Meryl Streep loves Clint. Everyone who ever worked on one of his pictures loves Clint (perhaps they read Patrick McGilligan’s 2002 biography of Eastwood, in which the author claims Eastwood fires anyone who criticizes him). Clint’s second wife loves Clint—she gathers for parties the seven children he’s sired by five women. Do the kids enter to “The March of the Siamese Children”? Perhaps Eastwood will star in a remake of The King and I.
A fistful of goo.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-85782-572-1
Page Count: 289
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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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