Tepid and corny. Whatever happened to Fatso Judson?
Hollywood heavy is really a teddy bear—a very dull teddy bear.
Born in 1917, Borgnine reflects on his long life and career in this oddly toothless memoir. He won an Academy Award for his portrayal of an introverted, lonely butcher in the 1955 film Marty, but Hollywood preferred him as sneering bully, and he was memorably imposing in such classics of macho cinema as From Here to Eternity, The Wild Bunch and The Dirty Dozen. How Borgnine felt about this typecasting remains a mystery, as he expresses wide-eyed gratitude for virtually every professional opportunity that came his way, repeatedly remarking on how lucky he was just to be in the business. Such modesty, though admirable, makes for dull reading. Largely forgotten movies like Hannie Caulder and Bunny O’Hare receive as much attention as the handful of classics Borgnine graced. The film fan eager for insights into the methods of Sam Peckinpah or Frank Sinatra will be frustrated, but those wondering if The Andy Griffith Show’s George “Goober” Lindsay was as friendly as he seemed on screen will be satisfied. (He was.) The much-married author is maddeningly circumspect when discussing his wives and marital difficulties. Of his short, surprising marriage to Broadway legend Ethel Merman, he divulges only that the relationship suffered when Merman became jealous of his greater fame. Borgnine is more forthcoming about his patriotism, expressing great admiration for John Wayne and Charlton Heston and, in a weirdly funny aside, defending the honor of cross-dressing FBI honcho J. Edgar Hoover. The pages fly by in a pleasant blur of “those were the days” homilies and aphoristic life lessons. He’s no prose stylist, but Borgnine’s enthusiasm for exclamation points is rather endearing—and they’re the appropriate punctuation for his relentlessly upbeat memoir.
Tepid and corny. Whatever happened to Fatso Judson?Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8065-2941-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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