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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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