A raw, messy volume of interview transcripts, saved in part by the unquenchable entertainment value of behind-the-scenes stories of how directors bring their movies to life. This edition is a spinoff of a monthly series of interviews conducted by Emery for the Encore cable network, although these are not transcripts of the shows. Emery is a CEO of Media Entertainment and a director himself, but there’s not much of him in this work except brief introductions of his subjects. He doesn—t even question the directors, who include James Cameron, Lawrence Kasdan, Richard Donner, and John Carpenter. All of the talking is left to the directors themselves, in whatever clipped or rambling or rambunctious manner they choose to employ. The result is a mishmash of material that never makes much sense as a collection. There’s lots of repetition, run-on sentences, and lost inflections. At some points, it’s hard to follow the speakers— narratives because the questions aren—t provided. At others, it feels as if one is reading a reporter’s notes instead of a book. The good material comes at the beginning of each section, as the directors talk about how they got started in the business. These were young men—all men in Take One—all of them movie lovers who found their way to Hollywood because of their passion (although Ron Howard was thrust before the camera before he could walk). The directors are led through their films one by one, doling out tidbits about casting and telling how they feel about their work. Unfortunately, most of their stories are cut short before they gather momentum, and nobody makes any startling revelations. Nevertheless, any volume that assembles the thoughts of Sidney Lumet, Spike Lee, Sydney Pollack, Norman Jewison, and Robert Wise is going to have some plums—for readers willing to dig deep enough. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57500-087-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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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