Like a couple of hours with Columbo, minus the genius—inessential, but still pretty good company.
Life and times of the man in the dirty raincoat.
Actor Falk’s distinctive persona is so familiar that it’s impossible to read any of this whimsical autobiography’s many bite-size chapters without hearing the man’s raspy mumble; that’s the principal source of charm here, perfectly complementing the digressive (read “unfocused”), no-big-deal account of the various jobs and colleagues that have marked Falk’s haphazard path. His career, which includes the iconic television role of Columbo (the deceptively brilliant detective—Sherlock Holmes in dumb-schlemiel drag) and stints with John Cassavetes and Neil Simon, is impressive, but Falk describes the work in a manner so unpretentious and offhand that he undercuts the justification for writing an autobiography in the first place. One wishes for a more in-depth account of, say, the making of Cassavetes’s seminal Husbands, but Falk is content to call the auteur a genius and leave it at that. He is reliably witty on his early career as a diffident government bureaucrat, and his indomitable independent streak is good for a number of anecdotes involving arrests in foreign lands. The Columbo sections are amusing, as Falk describes developing the detective’s mannerisms and appearance—the actor reveals much of his technique in these passages, and it is surprisingly beholden to the “outside-in” approach associated with classically trained actors, rather than the Method style suggested by the tortured improvisations that characterize Cassavetes’s work. But these insights are largely incidental. Falk admits at the outset that he fears his story will bore the reader, and his strategy is to set it down in easily digestible chunks with weirdly funny titles, such as “The Raisin Story” and “On the Role Overcoats Play in an Actor’s Career.” This approach indeed makes for a painless read, but underscores the general impression of inconsequence.
Like a couple of hours with Columbo, minus the genius—inessential, but still pretty good company.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1795-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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.
