by Michael Wood ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 24, 2015
The breadth of Hitchcock’s career and personal life defies easy summation, but Wood’s quickly paced, informative biography...
A brief portrait of cinema’s most iconic silhouette, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980).
The director’s work has the rare privilege of being equally acclaimed by critics and popular audiences. As such, Hitchcock’s films have become part of the collective imagination, and “Hitchcockian” is a common idiom used to describe films that parrot his signature style. With such vast influence, Wood (Emeritus, Comparative Literature/Princeton Univ.; Film: A Very Short Introduction, 2012, etc.) offers an entry-level study of the famed auteur, unpacking the ways in which Hitchcock “can change the way we see.” Besides showing off his talent for close reading as he dissects scenes from Hitchcock’s classic films and personal life, Wood also provides vital contextualization to the films he analyzes, such as his “British” films and those with political overtones made during wartime. What is most remarkable about Hitchcock’s films is his insistence on chance meetings, serendipity and mistaken identity. For Hitchcock, who was famously distrustful of authority, the ordered world, and its reliance on reason, was misleading. He found more truth in happenstance, in which the impossible was made ordinary, and he crafted a world in which the improbable was not only accepted by viewers, but expected. Wood gives special attention to Hitchcock’s most famous films, like Vertigo and North by Northwest, but the author also analyzes many of the early, less-recognized films. For all his celebrated artistic sensibility, Wood is clever to point out that Hitchcock was always dependent on the help of others, most importantly his wife, Alma, whom he outwardly relied on for artistic council—and without whom he may not have been so prolific or revered.
The breadth of Hitchcock’s career and personal life defies easy summation, but Wood’s quickly paced, informative biography is a welcome primer for anyone interested in learning more about one of film’s most important figures.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-45622-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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PROFILES
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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