Shedding light on the creation of a unique family and an American acting dynasty, this book is certain to become a Father’s...
The patriarch and scion of one of America’s best-known acting families take turns sharing the stories of their lives, careers and relationship.
The 2010 film The Way, written and directed by Estevez and starring Sheen, tells the story of a man who completes the journey along the Camino de Santiago pilgrim’s path begun by his son, who died en route. The movie provides the entry point for the authors—assisted by Edelman (The Possibility of Everything, 2009, etc.)—to relate their life stories, focusing on acting, faith, family and the filming of The Way. Sheen, born Ramon Estevez, the son of a Spanish immigrant father and Irish immigrant mother, grew up in a large Catholic family in Dayton, Ohio. Emilio Estevez was raised in Malibu, Calif., and on film and TV sets around the world as his father struggled to make a career as an actor and keep his family together. On the whole, the alternating voices work well, highlighting the similarities and differences in the father and son’s paths to professional and personal success and noting the failures and obstacles on the way. Estevez’s description of his experiences as a 14-year-old on the Philippines set of Apocalypse Now is particularly noteworthy, adding an extra dimension to the well-documented insanity of that film’s creation. The drawback to a double memoir becomes evident after a while, however, as the stories of auditions and film sets, fascinating though they may be, lessen the impact of what is intended to be the main focus: the life lessons each man draws from their father-son relationship.
Shedding light on the creation of a unique family and an American acting dynasty, this book is certain to become a Father’s Day gift staple for West Wing and Repo Man fans alike.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4368-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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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