This very slight portrait offers little for all but the most devoted, or ill-informed, of Witherspoon’s fans.
By-the-numbers biography of the A-list actress.
Sirius Satellite Radio producer Brown relies primarily on previous interviews with Reese Witherspoon to gain insight into her career. Cataloguing her work from The Man in the Moon (shot when the actress was 14) through a nude scene in Twilight to her star-making turn in Legally Blonde and Oscar-winning role in Walk the Line, the author doesn’t stray far in style or content from Witherspoon’s IMDb listing. Along the way, Brown also describes Witherspoon’s unremarkable personal life, including her brief time at Stanford University, her marriage to actor Ryan Phillippe, the birth of their two children and her divorce. The author reveals no surprises and takes great pains to paint her subject as a talented and hardworking professional, as devoted to craft as she is to being a traditional southern lady amid the distractions of Hollywood. Brown points out that Witherspoon goes to church and tries to keep her workload to one movie per year in order to spend more time with her children. The most provocative revelation here is that the actress harbors the desire to direct. The very Hollywood prose is innocent of the difference between an adjective and an adverb (at one point Witherspoon and Phillippe are “arguing so loud everyone at the party could hear”), and Brown has an annoying habit of referring to famous people by their first name, even when they’re as peripheral to the narrative as Robert De Niro or Martin Scorsese. The 15-page filmography and awards tally that close the text could serve adequately as an abridged version of the entire book.
This very slight portrait offers little for all but the most devoted, or ill-informed, of Witherspoon’s fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56025-988-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
SEEN & HEARD
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