Entertaining but shallow. Klam is perhaps too sensible a writer to care much about the filtered world of celebrities, and...
A collection of essays on our culture’s fascination with celebrities.
Klam (Friendkeeping: A Field Guide to the People You Love, Hate, and Can't Live Without, 2012, etc.) has done her share of celebrity journalism in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour. In her fifth book, she chronicles her interviews with one-time or sort-of celebrities like Timothy Hutton, whose 15 minutes came when he won an Oscar in 1980 at age 20 for Ordinary People, and Griffin Dunne, who starred in An American Werewolf in London. They come across as perfectly pleasant, polite guys with little apparent interest in the subject of celebrity. The author professes a fascination with celebrities that began when she was a teenager plastering her bedroom walls with pages from Tiger Beat, but by this point, that fascination has clearly faded, and she seems to be proceeding dutifully through all the expected bases. She observes strangers taking selfies outside the restaurant where Seinfeld was filmed, speaks with Quentin Tarantino’s publicist, discusses the necessity of plastic surgery for celebrities, frets about the Kardashians and their unearned fame, and interviews former Mets player R.A. Dickey, forgetting to turn on her tape recorder, with a resulting chapter that’s more about her than him. The book is padded with dozens of recollections of celebrity sightings by Klam’s friends and acquaintances. In the book’s most pleasurable moments, the author discusses her Aunt Mattie, an unabashed reality TV show fan who enjoys sitting in her La-Z-Boy with her dog and some licorice and pretzels to watch and muse on the complicated relationships in Love & Hip-Hop: Hollywood.
Entertaining but shallow. Klam is perhaps too sensible a writer to care much about the filtered world of celebrities, and her fundamental indifference to the subject, no matter how she struggles to overcome it, makes the book seem less than essential.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59463-136-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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