A nuanced and surprisingly tender depiction of a movie giant and a vanished industry.
A graphic novel focuses on the life of Hollywood legend Buster Keaton.
Barnett’s book, illustrated by Tavares, opens in Montreal in 1963. Thirty-two-year-old animation director Gerald Potterton is struck with the inspiration for a new film, the story of a funny “little man who travels across Canada on one of those little rail-speeders” and has lots of misadventures along the way. He brings his idea to the National Film Board of Canada along with his dream: to cast an aging Keaton as the protagonist. Keaton agrees, and Barnett’s narrative splits between chronicling the day-to-day triumphs and challenges of making The Railrodder and looking back at the celebrity’s long film career. Early on, he writes, directs, and appears in the 1921 silent movie The Playhouse. Keaton’s story progresses, flashback by flashback, through all the triumphs and challenges the star experiences on the path to becoming a cinematic titan, from pausing his career in order to serve in World War I to the making of the films that cemented his reputation as the greatest comic actor of all time. Since many of Keaton’s early movie projects have a spotty preservation record at best, every flashback has the feel of captivating speculation. Barnett has obviously steeped himself in Keaton lore, and the cast of characters, from studio foils and collaborators to the various people the filmmaker has personal relationships with through the years (the author provides a handy list of the players), is intriguing. But the consistent strength of Barnett’s writing is its complex, grounded affection for the older, more disillusioned Keaton, who works with Potterton on The Railrodder. That mature Keaton is also consistently well captured by Tavares’ artwork, particularly when contrasted with the younger, anything-goes, idealistic version of the man seen in flashbacks. Through the illustrator’s artwork and Barnett’s unaffected prose, a bygone Hollywood era beautifully comes to life.
A nuanced and surprisingly tender depiction of a movie giant and a vanished industry.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9781778288302
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Knockabout Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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