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THE ELEPHANTS IN MY BACKYARD

A MEMOIR

One of the more insightful and inspirational of the recent glut of showbiz memoirs.

A young actor loses a great role but finds a wonderful story to share.

Surendra might best be known through a memorable supporting role in Mean Girls, but this debut shows a real gift for writing, likely one that has been shaped by the story it relates. While still a student in Canada, the son of Tamil immigrants from India landed a role that would change his life—that of the rapping Kevin Gnapoor in the Tina Fey film starring Lindsay Lohan that would far exceed all expectations as a cult favorite. While shooting that movie, a cameraman strongly recommended the popular novel Life of Pi, and Surendra discovered a host of remarkable similarities between himself and the young Indian boy cast adrift on the sea. Then he learned that the novel was being adapted into a movie, and he devoted himself to landing the lead role. He traveled to India, immersed himself in the locations referenced in the novel, initiated a correspondence with novelist Yann Martel, and conquered his fear of water and learned to swim. Surendra even turned down an offer for regular work on a series to pursue the Life of Pi role. However, as Martel advised him, “it’s in the hands of Vishnu and Hollywood.” Early signs looked promising, as “the only notable brown director in Hollywood was attached—M. Night Shyamalan, of The Sixth Sense fame.” Alas, Shyamalan was only the first of many to be involved, and the process went on and on. Though many readers will know that the part went to someone else, the author’s determination was rewarded in different fashion: through what he learned about himself and the “salvation” he experienced. He remains an actor, but he has also established a successful commercial calligraphy business, and this book shows that he is an accomplished writer as well.

One of the more insightful and inspirational of the recent glut of showbiz memoirs.

Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-68245-050-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Regan Arts

Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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