Bets are that Doran spends more time in Italy now than he does in California.
He gave up television for a home in Tuscany, and he grouses about it?
Yes, writer-producer Doran’s comic transplanting from Los Angeles to rural Italy initially wrenched at the moorings of his wayward self-esteem, though it eventually cut him a new and better course. After 25 years, the successful sitcom veteran found himself struggling against the next wave, the young guys who were washing the old ones into the sea of unemployment. Fortunately, his wife was arranging a new life for them in Italy, where she had purchased a 250-year-old stone farmhouse atop a hill of olive trees outside the town of Combione. Will this be another self-congratulatory memoir of a well-off couple moving into the silvery haze of a midlife rejuvenation along the Mediterranean, throwing brickbats and dollars at the foibles of the locals? Thankfully, no. Doran is a deeply neurotic character, a man subject to anxiety attacks and facial tics when things go against him. It took him months to know a good thing when it bit his ankle. The stress of moving house, the troublesome brood living next door, the zealous bureaucratic confrontations, and the standard delays in getting anything done all drove him into a state of collapse. But he also came to realize that he had fed at the trough of Hollywood long enough and lived in his own skull too many years. His narrow band of emotions would be better served by a scream or a loud laugh, Doran concluded. He vented his “inner Italian,” the part that craved to savor life at full throttle, to e-mail his agent to stick it, to get married again (to the same woman). Sure, he sometimes broke into a sweat but he also slipped into a new life without the advantage of pharmo-chemicals.
Bets are that Doran spends more time in Italy now than he does in California.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-592-40118-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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