A globetrotting producer chronicles his misadventures while filming unscripted videos from around the world.
Former ad man Murphy founded the video production company Travalliance Media on a straightforward premise: head to the airport with a small crew, arrive at the destination and wing it. Naturally, when someone’s job relies on spontaneity and chance, things are occasionally bound to go wrong. And that’s where Murphy turns his capricious lens: to the often humiliating and uncomfortable struggle to get the perfect shot. Available as both an interactive e-book and traditional paperbound edition with supplemental photos and online videos, Murphy’s Bourdainian journeys take him to more than 20 locations, including Dublin, Tel Aviv and Moscow, as well as aboard America’s Grand Luxe train line. He and his companions try and fail to explore the seedy side of Bangkok, dodge piles of donkey dung in a downhill race to catch a boat in Greece, inadvertently go clubbing with a group of young Vietnamese women and try to avoid one aggressive tour guide after another. The stories vary in entertainment value, but most of them feel incomplete, too safe and anecdotal to be fully engaging. While in Vegas for a television appearance that never happens, Murphy devotes most of a chapter to mocking a drunken man he finds asleep in his hotel hallway. Aside from trying to stir the man, nothing much happens and Murphy ends the section with a bit of characteristic cheese: “It seemed pretty clear to me that this particular experience would ‘stay in Vegas.’” The author throws around puns (about the Chinese god of fireworks: “Zhu Rongs do not make a right”) and makes ample Murphy’s Law jokes. Some readers will be drawn in by this depiction of a germophobic 40something dude who still makes potty jokes, flirts with young foreign ladies and describes his travel-workout regimen in full detail. On the other hand, Murphy’s cool-dad tone (he references Bowie, Glenn Miller and the fact that he owns both an iPhone and an iPad) makes for a charming if infrequently obnoxious traveling companion. More memoir than travelogue, Murphy’s collection of escapades offers an interesting exposé of an unusual job.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0983943228
Page Count: 322
Publisher: High Point Executive Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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