A depressing and annoying account of the troubled life of actor River Phoenix. Phoenix's parents, surnamed Bottom, were the sort of earnest but ludicrous hippies who in 1970 could give their firstborn the name ``River Bottom'' without noticing its inauspiciousness. Within a couple of years the Bottoms had joined a sinister pseudo- Christian cult, the Children of God, under whose edicts River was apparently introduced to sexual relations at age four. Renamed the Phoenixes by the cult, the family wound up in Venezuela as missionaries. By the time they dropped out, six-year-old River had become the indigent family's principal breadwinner, singing in the street for coins. Soon the Phoenixes moved to L.A. to try to capitalize on River's charisma and talent. There followed appearances in TV commercials and series, and eventually success in feature films such as Stand by Me and Running on Empty. In public, Phoenix was a clean-living vegan and environmental activist, but privately he drank, smoked, and at least sporadically used drugs. Given the childhood sexual abuse, the fact that he spent much of his adolescence in front of a camera, and his parents' conviction that he had a mission to reform the world, it's not hard to imagine the pressures and insecurities that ultimately led to Phoenix's death by multiple-drug overdose at age 23. Glatt (Rage & Roll, 1993) gives only an occasional inkling that he recognizes Phoenix's appeal: The actor gave some edgy, brilliant performances, and he wrote his own finest scene, the narcoleptic hustler's campfire soul-baring in My Own Private Idaho. Glatt did not speak to most of Phoenix's intimates and colleagues in any depth, when he spoke to them at all; much of his information is taken from magazine and newspaper articles, with no attempt at a unifying point of view. Puffy amusement for celebrity-trauma fans that lacks any fondness for its subject. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-426-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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