A snarky, muckraking, indulgent treat for film buffs.
A British stand-up comedian turned journalist scrutinizes four celebrated, heavy-drinking actors.
Sellers’ blackly humorous biography chronicles the bawdy, outrageous reputations of “four of the greatest boozers that ever walked—or staggered—into a pub. It’s a “celebratory catalogue of their miscreant deeds” that thankfully incorporates notes of humor and revelation, since these conditions not only stalled their careers but cost them their livelihoods. Welsh actor Richard Burton, once one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood, claimed apathy (and a stream of cinematic “drivel”) as his primary reason for drinking, that life offstage was too much of a sobering reversal to handle without alcohol. Irishman Richard Harris abused alcohol for most of his life while achieving fame in the film adaptation of Camelot (1967), then more recently as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series. Despite winning major acclaim in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Peter O’Toole’s heavy drinking and public brawling sabotaged his career. After some resulting major surgery, his ability to garner film roles was stunted further. British actor Oliver Reed, the most notorious of the “hellraisers,” died amid a legendary drinking binge in Malta during the filming of Gladiator (1999). Sellers delivers decades of debauched history and insider Hollywood information on his subjects, from the “The Plastered Fifties” to “The Pickled Nineties.” Chain-smoking Burton was prone to rages and a voracious sexual appetite; Harris’ domineering personality and days-long drinking binges often trumped his notoriety; O’Toole, saddled with eccentricities and a failing marriage, befriended Burton in a union that Elizabeth Taylor quickly squashed; and Reed’s dour public image suffered even more after his penchant for “showing his cock in public” emerged. Of the four, only O’Toole endures, “the last surviving British reprobate” who “knows he’s been living on borrowed time for years, watching all his drinking pals from the 60s [sic] go under turf one by one.”
A snarky, muckraking, indulgent treat for film buffs.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-55399-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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
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