A somewhat-scattered but engagingly nostalgic showbiz remembrance.
Bolt’s debut memoir captures the life and loves of a woman who set off to Hollywood with a dream to meet Burt Reynolds and became a stuntwoman.
In Decatur, Illinois, “The Soybean Capital of the World,” a young Bolt struggled after her parents’ divorce. As she came of age, she began to learn how to take care of herself due to her father’s quick temper and her mother’s mental illness. While living with her dad and frequenting Decatur’s pubs alongside him, the junior high schooler became attracted to his adult friend Jerry. Bolt’s narration goes on to reflect her development from a sharp yet naïve child to a rebellious, stubborn teen. A high school dropout at 16, Bolt succeeded at driving solo to California with nothing but a borrowed Eagles eight-track tape, a giant stuffed frog, and $250 in her pocket. She worked the graveyard shift at a 7-Eleven to take advantage of opportunities as a movie extra during the day. Along the way, Bolt navigated the seedy world of auditions, headshots, and casting scams but ended up discovering a passion for stunts. Driven by a dream to star in a movie with movie star Reynolds, Bolt dexterously juggled her priorities while also figuring out where she stood when it came to her impassioned relationship with a married cop. In this debut memoir, Bolt offers a poignant, dynamic, and charming tale of love. As it rolls along, she offers anecdotes that may make some readers nostalgic for the Hollywood of decades past. At one point, she points out that her third grade teacher wrote on the girl’s report card, “Catches on slowly, but then understands well,” which will also likely apply to readers of the memoir, as paragraph by paragraph, the author’s narrative threads don’t seem to immediately and obviously tie together. But although her tales seem a tad disjointed at times, they do satisfyingly weave themselves together in the end. (Includes black-and-white and color family photos.)
A somewhat-scattered but engagingly nostalgic showbiz remembrance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73402-795-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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