Plodding prose, factual errors, quotes culled from other interviews and sub–US Weekly photos add up to a pointless and...
An unapologetically reverent celebrity tell-all without all that much to tell.
Hard-drinking Irish lad Colin Farrell is quite probably more recognizable from his ubiquitous presence in the tabloids than he is on the silver screen. Born and raised in an upper-middle-class suburb of Dublin, Farrell was given access to a large house, manicured lawn, doting mother and the best education in the country. Son of a (once) regionally famous football player, the youngest Farrell offspring was lackadaisical at best, delinquent at worst. His teen years were spent in a haze of drugs and booze, and it was only after failing at everything else—football, school, even as a sales assistant—that our non-working class hero wandered into acting, propelled more than anything by his movie-star looks. Acting school, bit indie-film parts and a small role on a soap opera followed, but Farrell’s breakthrough came when Kevin Spacey discovered him in a London play. The rest is, of course, the story of every modern movie star from Clooney to Cruise. Kelly’s book smacks of Irish pride and provincialism, making it dull for anyone outside of the British Isles. The writer tries to make her subject’s success symbolize that of a nation, yet her major misstep is to not recognize that Farrell is not only an unsympathetic character, but one-dimensional and prone to posturing. As one of the many sixth-degree sources tells Kelly, the actor is “posher than he makes out.” To substitute for a lack of depth, the writer almost obsessively harps on Farrell’s indulgent boozing and womanizing, perhaps thinking that, repeated enough, this will amount to some kind of personality.
Plodding prose, factual errors, quotes culled from other interviews and sub–US Weekly photos add up to a pointless and poorly written celebography.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-84454-171-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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