More fan fodder, enlivened by Billy’s witty observations.
Further incisive revelations distinguish actress-turned-psychologist Stephenson’s follow-up to her perceptive biography of husband Connolly (Billy, 2002), a noted Scottish comedian and actor.
Though this sequel loosely follows the year Billy turns 60, it’s as much about Stephenson herself. Each chapter begins with a recollection of his past—searching trashcans for sledding materials, sneaking his Protestant friends into a Catholic teenagers’ dance, becoming a paratrooper while on National Service—and then segues into his birthday year. The family alternates between Scotland and Los Angeles, with much traveling in between. Billy is on location in Canada and Somalia; Pamela takes their two teenaged daughters to India, where they visit the shelters established by the Connollys for streetwalkers’ children. Billy is ambivalent about his birthday, still subject to frequent nightmares in which he relives his troubled childhood: his mother left home, he was reared in a Glasgow slum by sadistic aunts, his father abused him. But Pamela continues her preparations for the August celebration, a weekend-long extravaganza at their estate in Scotland that includes the reenactment of a medieval battle, kilted pipe-bands, the honoring of the haggis, and a guest list studded with luminaries (Judi Dench, Bob Geldof), as well as Billy’s mates from his pre-fame days, when he worked as a welder. Billy survives, admitting that he normally doesn’t like birthday parties but absolutely loved his own. This naturally pleases Pamela, who is acutely aware of the demons in her man’s past, even though he stopped drinking and taking drugs in his 40s. She follows up the weekend blast with a (slightly) lower-key celebration on the actual day later in the year in Fiji, where she’s studying a group of transgendered Fijians. Evident throughout the witty text is her crucial role as a loving but concerned monitor of her husband’s life.
More fan fodder, enlivened by Billy’s witty observations.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7553-1284-8
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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