by Stephen Weissman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2008
Find space on the crowded Chaplin shelf for this perceptive, literate take on the great screen clown.
A fresh entry in the evergreen field of works devoted to Charlie Chaplin.
If ever an artist’s life lent itself to psychoanalysis, it’s Chaplin’s. His alcoholic father abandoned him and his brother when they were children, leaving him in the abject poverty of a London slum with an encephalitic mother who ended up in a madhouse. “We laugh…in order not to weep,” said Chaplin years later. Rather than take the fun out of Chaplin’s comedies with tendentious theorizing, Weissman, a faculty member at the Washington School of Psychiatry, lends dimension to the classics, drawing reasonable connections between Chaplin’s life and art. The author demonstrates Chaplin’s ability to transform family heartbreak into film comedies such as The Gold Rush, Modern Times and City Lights. Equally influential on Chaplin’s art were the early days he spent honing his craft in British music halls. With lean, energetic prose, Weissman ably sidesteps stilted academic writing to bring this colorful theatrical period to life. He offers vivid sketches of the hardships of touring in the hardscrabble provinces and the painstaking, meticulous ways in which Chaplin honed his talents. Childhood pain, the music-hall apprenticeships and the new art of film aligned in Hollywood as Chaplin went to work for director Mack Sennett. Weissman carefully follows the confluence of several artists that led to the creation of Chaplin’s iconic Little Tramp. Throughout the book, the author caps exhaustive sourcing with an overlay of insightful observations about Chaplin’s creative process.
Find space on the crowded Chaplin shelf for this perceptive, literate take on the great screen clown.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55970-892-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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