Fawning biography of a not particularly complicated celebrity, containing few surprises and little insight.
Celebrity biographer Russell (Arise Sir Tom Jones, 2007, etc.) chooses as her latest subject the phenomenally popular soccer star.
Beckham isn’t merely a very skilled athlete, she suggests, but an icon deserving a knighthood. This is a difficult claim to make since he doesn’t come across as unusually culturally or socially active. In chronological fashion, Russell recounts Beckham’s already well-known history: childhood soccer prodigy, Manchester United star, romance with wife Victoria (aka Posh Spice), move to Real Madrid and finally a quarter-billion-dollar contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy. Along the way, the author works hard to demonstrate that Beckham is deeper than the average celebrity. She points out that, although he works in the hyper-macho world of competitive sports, he enjoys fashion and accepts his status as a sex symbol to gay men. (While unusual among athletes, this isn’t quite on par with Dennis Rodman wearing drag or Billie Jean King defeating Bobby Riggs.) Russell’s effort to paint Beckham as beyond mere celebrity superficialities, however, is undercut by the fact that she goes out of her way to attach a dollar value to just about everything he gets or owns, from salary and cars to homes and jewelry. The biography reads like little more than a puff piece gleaned from dozens of tabloid clippings. It chronicles events familiar to any Beckham fan, including his turbulent relationship with Manchester’s old-school manager, Alex Ferguson, the births of his children and the rumors of infidelity that rocked the perception of Beckham as, in Russell’s hyperbolic words, “the world’s best husband and father.”
Fawning biography of a not particularly complicated celebrity, containing few surprises and little insight.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84454-416-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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