A dispiriting account of a great star and not-so-great human being.
On-screen and off with the “King of Cool.”
Veteran celebrity biographer Eliot’s (Paul Simon: A Life, 2010, etc.) portrait of film star Steve McQueen (1930–1980) is a curiously sour reading experience. The subject emerges as a singularly petty and unpleasant personality, a minor talent who left a meager cinematic legacy completely out of proportion with his enduring status as an icon of mid-20th-century “cool.” In this telling, McQueen’s less-than-impressive filmography is the result of the star’s persistent small-mindedness, as he habitually gravitated toward working with directors he could dominate and turned down promising roles—he could have been the Sundance Kid, but walked when he couldn’t get top billing over rival Paul Newman—out of spite, laziness and easily injured ego. A hardscrabble childhood led to a period of small-time criminality and military service before McQueen drifted into acting, attracted to the profession for its many opportunities to smoke dope and sleep with pretty young actresses. He made a hit with the TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive, in which he perfected a sullen, wary, catlike screen presence that radiated charisma and danger, and he would keep sounding those same few notes throughout his career. Eliot praises McQueen’s iconic impact in such films as The Magnificent Seven, Bullitt and The Getaway, but these successes come off as lucky intersections of good timing and congenial material rather than the expression of a significant artistic talent. Eliot’s matter-of-fact recounting of McQueen’s gluttonous appetite for drugs, compulsive womanizing, sickening instances of wife-beating and petulant bullying are difficult to stomach, as they seem less like the torments of a complicated artist than the sordid habits of a profoundly spoiled, selfish, bitter man. The author writes of McQueen poring over the script of The Towering Inferno, counting his lines to make sure that co-star Paul Newman didn’t have more to do and childishly insisting on delivering the last line of the film. That about sums it up.
A dispiriting account of a great star and not-so-great human being.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-45321-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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