The author vacillates between theory-lite, barstool pontification and biography—but his book is sure to delight hardcore...
Prolific novelist Charyn (The Green Lantern, 2005, etc.) meditates on the life and work thus far of the controversial film auteur.
A motor-mouthed goofball, Quentin Tarantino mythologized his childhood, spinning tales of a half-Native-American hippie mother and vagabond existence. Charyn gets the real story from Mama Tarantino herself. Raised in a Los Angeles suburb as much by television and comic books as by his young, single mother, the boy was unfocused in school and dropped out at age 16. He found his Xanadu working at the now-storied Video Archives in Manhattan Beach. The “Archive Dogs,” over whom Tarantino ruled, created a makeshift film school, watching and discussing movies near-constantly. Here, Tarantino penned his breakthrough film, Reservoir Dogs, and met Roger Avary, with whom he would later share the Oscar for their Pulp Fiction screenplay. Charyn briefly chronicles these auspicious beginnings, combining biography with three streams of tangents: responses to critics’ readings of Tarantino’s work; his own readings, complete with scene analyses; and background (sprinkled with pop psychology) on Tarantino’s posse of collaborators. He sticks with this unfocused formula to explore Pulp Fiction’s runaway success and Tarantino’s subsequent three films, ending with musings on his subject’s past and future. The book is spotty and tries to be too many things at once. Still, Charyn, who teaches film part-time at the American University in Paris, has strong ideas, particularly about Tarantino’s conflation of humor and violence, and about the void that, paradoxically, forms the core of his not-so-empty cinema. Charyn successfully depicts Tarantino as a multifaceted character: an actor who has written his own perpetual role as a film director; the reincarnation of Orson Welles, with additional media savvy; a baby in a giant’s body; and an egotistical artist in possession of an odd sort of brilliance.
The author vacillates between theory-lite, barstool pontification and biography—but his book is sure to delight hardcore fans, students of Postmodern Cinema and the subject himself.Pub Date: June 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-858-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
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
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