Kind of a waste of time.
A tell-too-much, say-too-little collection of autobiographical essays about one woman’s B-grade brushes with stardom.
The latest from Hollywood writer and producer Wilder-Taylor falls well short of satisfying. The first two-thirds of the book deal with her many mishaps along the road to something like fame. After graduating from high school, she went to New York City with vague ambitions of becoming an actress. But her stage career began and ended in an Italian restaurant where, as a singing waitress, she demonstrated her total lack of vocal skills. In Los Angeles, she found her way as a dancing extra in a Bob Dylan-Dave Stewart music video that quickly “fell off into oblivion.” Later, Wilder-Taylor auditioned for a dating show called Studs, only to find herself paired with a man who “looked like a bisexual pirate.” Ever in search of celebrity—or at least, of a way to be near it—the author briefly drove limos for the likes of such minor screen luminaries as Lolita Davidovich and Justine Bateman. The narrative, which moves rather disconnectedly between episodes, displays even more disjointedness in the final third of the book. Wilder-Taylor, now an established figure in the entertainment industry, struggled to cope not only with the demands of her career, but also motherhood, all while trying to deal with an drinking problem that had been present since her teens. In between snarky “letters” she writes to Angelina Jolie about the actress’ too-perfect maternal image and to David Hasselhoff about their common “crazy love of booze,” the author offers maddeningly brief glimpses of real emotional poignancy in her depiction of her alcohol and codeine-dependent father and their rocky relationship. Wilder-Taylor’s often self-deprecating candor is the book’s greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness. While she freely provides gossipy tidbits about her life and adventures, her capacity to move beyond the superficially funny and into the meaningfully humorous is lacking.
Kind of a waste of time.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7657-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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