Better than the usual run of actor memoirs and plenty of fun to boot.
The noted film actor and notorious bad boy hunkers down and tells a few tales of his life, some of which just may be true.
“Let me tell you about my testicle tuck,” writes Nolte by way of an opening gambit. There are plenty of other bodily points of interest, as well: for one thing, the author had a well-developed habit of smacking his head against hard objects, like the sides of cars, “to relieve a little stress.” Fortunately, he survived, having finally learned that “running my head into cars was signaling…I needed help.” As his memoir unwinds, it’s clear where some of the stress and self-destruction came from. Back in Iowa, life presented its own hardships in the form of a war-scarred father and a mother who fed Dexedrine to young Nick, who recalls that the so-called vitamin “would have me bouncing off the walls in no time, eager as hell to get to school and wreak whatever havoc I could.” Havoc is a useful keyword, for there are plenty of opportunities to watch it in play as Nolte stumbles into an acting career and finds that he’s good at it, even if his early work was dismissed as lunk-headed and wooden. Things got better with Karel Reisz’s Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978), the film version of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, “an important film for me because I was able to display some depth as an actor and a complexity far beyond what The Deep revealed.” Nolte casts a gimlet eye on his performances and the circumstances surrounding them, performances that have included such brilliant work as the cynical football hero of North Dallas Forty but have lately centered on a character he calls the “designated old guy.” Long since on the wagon and an obviously thoughtful man, Nolte seems to share the reader’s surprise that he lived long enough to take that role.
Better than the usual run of actor memoirs and plenty of fun to boot.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-221957-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
