Occasionally overwritten, but a rich portrayal of an unconventional, free-wheeling thinker whose checkered experiences shock...
A hip biography of American actor, photographer and pop-art collector Dennis Hopper (1936–2010).
Folsom (The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld, 2009, etc.) considers Hopper as an energetic acolyte of James Dean who cultivated a renegade persona through drug abuse, sexual wildness, violence and confrontations with directors as well as other studio figures over embracing method acting when it was regarded with skepticism. Spanning Hopper's beginnings in theater to a part in Rebel Without a Cause, his ambitious project in Peru, The Last Movie and a career resurgence later in life, the author emphasizes how the actor's talent was sometimes overshadowed by his reputation—to the extent that the actor once agreed in a 60 Minutes interview that his work could be regarded as a failure with moments of brilliance. Folsom’s tendency toward extended metaphors occasionally hinders the narrative—e.g., of Hollywood legends, he writes, “Up in the firmament, outside his [Peter Fonda’s] window, Brando, Dean, and Clift twinkled in the cosmos. Marlon’s comet shone brightest. It hooked around the sun, didn’t get sucked in, and then seemed to orbit around it. A celestial navigator, Fonda watched it come, exit, it was really incredible. The tail of the comet sent showers and meteors fizzing down through the atmosphere.” There are also several other instances of purple prose, but Folsom provides frank anecdotes regarding Hopper's fellow actors, such as Natalie Wood.
Occasionally overwritten, but a rich portrayal of an unconventional, free-wheeling thinker whose checkered experiences shock and beguile on the page.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0062206947
Page Count: 352
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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