Possessing a certain charm, but missing a lot of pieces. (Photos throughout)
Curious and evocative fragments of autobiography by boulevardier and screenwriter Moffat, gathered and embellished by Lambert (Natalie Wood, 2004, etc.).
Curious because Moffat struck no great sparks in a life devoted mainly to serial infidelities. In an extended introductory biography, Lambert paints a fast portrait. His parents left young Ivan in the aristocratic care of his grandmother, Lady Tree (which means he was raised by nannies), and boarding school offered the classic immersion in English bestiality. But during his WWII stint in the film corps, he met George Stevens and ignited his career as a screenwriter and script doctor. Moffat worked on Giant, Shane, A Place in the Sun, They Came to Cordura, and other film and TV productions—though his time in Hollywood was short. His later years were mostly given over to luxury (as much of it as he could afford or take advantage of) and romance. The glancing text is evocative because the catalogue of Moffat’s girlfriends, wives, and swell gatherings conjures up a world in which someone whose family was heavy on bloodlines though short on cash got to spend a good amount of time in the great houses and castles of Europe. The autobiographical component here, which Moffat wrote in fits and starts over the years, relates his days visiting with the vanishing aristocracy and the High Bohemia of the Gargoyle Club. Lambert includes letters and interviews, but they have a tendency to be superficial, such as an anecdote about how Stevens didn’t like Citizen Kane at first, then “reconsidered all that, and thought how serious and marvelous it was, one of the best films he’d ever seen.” There are a few good tidbits, however, as when Dylan Thomas advised Charlie Chaplin, who was having trouble with the press, to “tell them to go fuck their bloody eyelids.”
Possessing a certain charm, but missing a lot of pieces. (Photos throughout)Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42247-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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