A lively look at a colorful career and an unlikely friendship.
Veteran Hollywood stuntman, dialogue coach, actor, producer and director Hinkle wryly recounts his adventures in Movieland, most notably a close friendship with James Dean.
After a spell toiling on the peripheries of the film industry, in 1955 the proud Texan and rodeo cowboy was approached by director George Stevens, who was interested in procuring Hinkle’s services for his upcoming adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Giant. Hinkle, an aspiring actor, reckoned he’d be perfect for the role of young West Texan hotshot Jett Rink, but Stevens had other ideas: He asked Hinkle to help star Rock Hudson talk like a genuine Texan cowboy. The author took the job and became fast friends with the actor cast to play Rink, a young up-and-comer who called himself Jimmy Dean. Hinkle’s anecdotes of life with Dean on the set are warm and amusing, offering an irresistibly prosaic glimpse of the elusive legend, with whom Hinkle hunted rabbits, raced cars and engaged in other hijinks. Hinkle enjoyed a sort of older-brother relationship with the star, teaching Dean to spin a rope and dress in authentic cowboy style, and welcomed the lonely actor into his family. His account of Dean’s tragic early death is freshly affecting, despite the story’s mythic familiarity. Hinkle is a garrulous storyteller—though he occasionally lays on the Texas Pride schtick a little thickly—and his memories of Elizabeth Taylor’s passionate personality and salty language, Hudson’s moody insecurity and Dean’s fierce competitiveness are good fun. After Giant, Hinkle’s career spun out in a number of improbable directions, including stunt flying, forming his own successful production company and managing motorcycle madman Evel Knievel. All of this is diverting, but the heart of the book is Hinkle’s friendship with Dean, who comes across as an uncommonly sensitive and kind young man. The anecdotes about the eventful making of Giant are Hollywood insider gold.
A lively look at a colorful career and an unlikely friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4093-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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