Flashy and funny, with flamboyance to burn, just like Hamilton.
Colorful, charismatic star of stage and screen recounts 50 years of the Hollywood life, with the assistance of veteran co-author Stadiem (Too Rich: The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk, 1991, etc.).
After Hamilton dishes out some spicy insider information from his stint on Dancing with the Stars in 2005 (steroid use, allowing his partner to blatantly mask his lack of dancing acumen), the actor dives right into his turbulent, nomadic childhood. After his parents divorced, Hamilton’s Christian Scientist mother swiftly moved the family to Hollywood, where many years earlier she had unsuccessfully attempted a film career. The random relocations continued as she discovered better ways to live—and better men to live with. In 1950, when Hamilton was not yet 12, he was shipped off to live with his father, a bandleader in New York City. His urban “adult education” prospered by way of illicit sex with his stepmother, time spent at military school in Mississippi and a short-lived stay in Boston with his newly remarried mother. Following her from there to Washington, D.C., Acapulco and Palm Beach, he realized at an early age that he could garner attention with “the smile I had learned to use to cover all my fears.” His love of the stage took hold at Palm Beach High School, and once he was back in Los Angeles Hamilton’s career mushroomed from smaller roles into a prestigious contract with MGM. From this moment on, he drops Old Hollywood names with wild abandon. Some of the narrative reads like tabloid fodder, with Hamilton right in the middle of all the Tinseltown commotion. (The 69-year-old actor has two sons nearly 30 years apart in age.) His bountiful life has had its share of blunders, the dapper “silver fox” admits, but he is still able to “laugh at myself.”
Flashy and funny, with flamboyance to burn, just like Hamilton.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4502-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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