For Clueless obsessives—and perhaps Jane Austen fans.
The legacy of the 1995 movie described as "a Rodeo Drive version of Jane Austen's Emma.”
Pop-culture journalist Chaney, a former staff writer for the Washington Post, examines the enduring popularity of the teen comedy Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling. The movie is an update of Austen's 1815 comedy of manners about a spoiled, self-assured matchmaker. Chaney’s interview subjects, who include the film’s producers, filmmakers, designers, actors, and artists, repeatedly "express[ed] feelings often bathed in warmth and nostalgia for a time that not only shaped their careers but, on many days, was just a joy.” Many of the contributors coo over star Alicia Silverstone's adorable nature—e.g., associate producer Twink Caplan: "she was so pure, Alicia, so sweet and just a joy, just really a joy, you know.” The tell-all aspect of the book consists of saccharine and tedious accounts about how it was "a happy movie to watch and…a largely happy movie to make as well” and how the set was “a harmonious, low-key environment.” As composer David Kitay notes, “it was just this awesome haze of fun.” Later, Chaney argues weakly for "The Impact of Clueless" since the movie's release—though “the virgin who can’t drive” remains timeless—and she oversteps in her claim that it demonstrates how women in the early 21st century are disciples of protagonist Cher Horowitz. The author focuses more on the movie's influence on fashion and language than her subchapter titled "The Impact of Clueless on: Girl Power and Progressiveness" would suggest. Her position that Clueless was a culturally significant movie with an enduring legacy is more fitting for Heckerling—who proved the Hollywood naysayers wrong about the film's marketability, eventually selling it to Scott Rudin—and the resourceful and assertive women in media and academia who followed her.
For Clueless obsessives—and perhaps Jane Austen fans.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9908-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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