Alternately entertaining and tiresome.
A meandering unauthorized biography of Jeff Goldblum emphasizing his adorable mystique during a fraught cultural era.
Washington Post pop-culture reporter Andrews relies on keen research and an energetic voice to portray Goldblum as a self-aware avatar of social media–nourished celebrity. The actor is widely considered to be a thoughtful, decent person, and his ubiquitous smirking visage memes and pranks elevate him above other gracefully aging A-listers. “Goldblum as a subject, though, has the inherent power to make oddities go viral,” writes the author. “It seems there’s just something about Jeff Goldblum.” Andrews emphasizes the critic’s role in such contemplations of celebrity, frequently invoking his personal perspective. These digressions include footnoted callouts to his mother, interludes including Goldblum-inspired haiku, made-up interviews with his subject, and rambling meditations on Bill Murray and Christopher Walken (“A Seemingly Random Batch of Paragraphs About Bill Murray and Christopher Walken (and Sort of Warren Zevon and Randy Newman but Not Really) as a Means of Understanding Jeff Goldblum Slightly Better”). Andrews relies on earlier Goldblum interviews, conversations with childhood friends, and the work of critics like Chuck Klosterman. The author covers Goldblum’s rise as an actor, from his debut role as a sociopath in Death Wish to blockbusters like The Fly and Jurassic Park, as well as an overview of his gradual transformation into a bohemian fashionista, covering his obsession with jazz piano (which he credibly performs in concert) and his romantic life, including relationships with Geena Davis and Laura Dern. In arguing his acting has seemed blander since the millennium, the author writes, “the theory that Goldblum only tackles projects he finds artistically interesting and never falls into the trap of careerism falters a bit when considering some of his more commercial work.” While Andrews establishes that Goldblum embodies a unique brand of self-knowing celebrity, his prominent, exaggerated writer’s persona becomes tedious—though the author’s core claim may appeal to well-informed trend-spotters: “Seriously, is anyone more well liked than this dude?”
Alternately entertaining and tiresome.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4603-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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