One can’t help but wonder whether a night of drinking with the author might be more fun than reading this exhaustive...
One of Hollywood’s most successful and influential stuntmen recounts a life filled with fast living, hard partying and dozens of broken bones.
In most on-screen situations, stuntmen are seen and not heard. Needham, a true innovator of his craft who’s not shy about touting his accomplishments, is a colorful exception. Growing up as a poor sharecropper’s son in Arkansas, the undereducated author parlayed stints as a tree climber and paratrooper into a career as a stuntman at a time when there was a high demand for men willing to fling themselves from horseback, get blown up and choreograph a bar brawl. His (self-proclaimed) ingenuity, willingness to try anything and work ethic soon led to more work than he could handle. Needham began to train other stuntmen, working his way up to the position of stunt coordinator and second-unit director while still performing death-defying falls, car crashes and jumps alongside of or doubling some of the most famous actors in the business, including John Wayne and Burt Reynolds. His stories are by turns entertaining and gripping, including an account of running in the real cross-country Cannonball race—the inspiration for the comedy classic Cannonball Run, which Needham directed—and a daring escape from Prague amid a movie shoot after an invasion by Russian troops. After a while, though, the author’s self-aggrandizing style, peppered with braggadocio and oozing machismo, becomes monotonous, rendering what could have been an exhilarating and enlightening insider’s guide from a groundbreaking performer into little more than a self-serving memoir that strokes an already well-stroked ego.
One can’t help but wonder whether a night of drinking with the author might be more fun than reading this exhaustive chronicle. A little Hal goes a long way.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-07899-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
