A worthy—perhaps even enviable—life related with passion, certitude and considerable artistry.
The creator and host of Inside the Actors Studio summarizes his multifaceted career (writer, actor, dancer, academic dean—and more) and rehearses his favorite moments from his award-winning TV show.
Lipton begins with some background on the Actors Studio (born in 1947) and the birth of his show in 1994, then outlines his autobiography. When the author was six, his poet father “disappeared one day, just vanished, was gone, without a prior hint or word of warning.” His mother, a “proud and independent spirit,” was forced to move with her young son back into her parents’ house to stay afloat financially. After a brief discussion of his father’s poetry and his own nascent literary aspirations, Lipton reviews his early archetypal struggles in the Big Apple and his gradual emergence as a writer and producer during the infancy of television. (And, he notes, he was into pilates way before the rest of us.) If Lipton is a bit fond of self-praise (Leonard Bernstein loved Lipton’s book, An Exaltation of Larks; Lipton finessed James Dickey into revising a presentation), he does indeed have much to be proud of. In the longest (and at times, most tedious) portion of this otherwise fascinating memoir, Lipton offers a sort of textual equivalent of a TV highlight reel: Russell Crowe proved to be “an amiable guest, a knowledgeable teacher and a conscious craftsman”; Christopher Reeve remained articulate after his accident; Jennifer Lopez offered “an infusion of spine and guts”; Angelina Jolie possesses “guileless candor.” And so on. In the sad conclusion, Lipton tells how and why the Actors Studio program recently left the New School and moved to Pace University. And what is Lipton’s response to Will Ferrell’s famous impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live (which is alluded to throughout the book)? “Upset me! No one waited more eagerly for the next installment.”
A worthy—perhaps even enviable—life related with passion, certitude and considerable artistry.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-525-95035-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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
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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