A lightweight entertainment that demonstrates the old saw that life can truly be stranger than fiction.
The actor who played “the most interesting man in the world” is more interesting than you might have anticipated.
Goldsmith’s star turn came late in his career, in his late 60s, when, “living like a hobo,” he was called to audition for a Dos Equis beer campaign. He was dubious about how “a Jewish guy from the Bronx” could be a pitchman for a Mexican beer, but he was not exactly swimming in competing offers. “They want a Hemingway kind of guy,” his agent told him; they also wanted storytelling improvisation at the audition, asking only that it end with the line, “And that’s how I arm-wrestled Fidel Castro.” Goldsmith’s memoir reads like a collection of tall tales, though the author insists they are true, and it suggests that he spent his whole life preparing to audition for the role he would never have imagined. The spirit of adventure channels Hemingway, while the tone (of the commercials as well) owes more to Fernando Lamas, or “Fern, as I came to know him,” who served as a mentor of masculinity for the younger actor. The adventures extend to the bedroom, where his lovers included the semifamous (Tina Louise), the anonymous, and the pseudonymous—e.g., “Wind Nymph.” With a flair for name-dropping, Goldsmith recalls his rivalry with “Dusty” Hoffman, with whom he often competed for parts and to whom he prophesied, “I’m going make it and you’re not.” (Oops! “Over the next forty years, I would have those words to eat.”) The author has lived a colorful life, to be sure, and he relates it in anecdotal chapters of a couple of pages each, but no publisher would have been interested if a chance commercial break hadn’t given him his breakthrough. In the wake of that, Michael Jordan asked to have a picture taken with him, and he was invited to Camp David as “a birthday surprise for President Barack Obama.”
A lightweight entertainment that demonstrates the old saw that life can truly be stranger than fiction.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98623-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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