A satisfying if sometimes-dark read for Palin’s many fans. Those interested in the inner workings of showbiz will find much...
Now is the ’90s of our discontent….
It’s not exactly a decennium horribilis that Monty Python member and world traveler Palin (The Truth, 2013, etc.) describes in this journal. As the author notes at the start of this third volume, he closed the late 1980s with the sense that he’d been frittering away his life, someone “who had reached his mid-forties with no great adventures to show for it.” Be careful what you wish for, for Palin immediately found himself swept up in what would become a quarter-century–long series of televised adventures, beginning with sturdy vehicles such as Around the World in Eighty Days and Pole to Pole and spinning off in all sorts of directions. In between, though, were the standard press junkets: show up for a screening, a book signing, a gallery opening, “pontificate on the Python years and become pretentious.” Palin reveals himself to be a serious, sympathetic fellow most of the time, if sometimes given to self-doubt and moping. At turns, he is speaking in hushed tones with Fergie, the Duchess of York, and finding her more congenial and substantial than he might have thought (“She paints a depressing, almost frightening, picture of the royal life”); worrying at world events such as a renewed IRA bombing campaign in London (“they kill out of an intensity, a fierceness, a dogged, deep unshakeable belief, as people have done throughout history”); and trying to pull together sometimes-warring factions into a reunion (“the unsatisfactory Python stage show business pushes itself, once again, into the front of my mind”). The decade’s worth of notes ends on a rather dour note, befitting a gloomy English new year that, of course, he could escape by hopping on a jet to some more tropical clime.
A satisfying if sometimes-dark read for Palin’s many fans. Those interested in the inner workings of showbiz will find much of value, too.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07707-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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