Travolta deserves a serious book. This is not it.
Incoherent mash note to the man in the white suit.
Celebrity biographer Clarkson (Cruise Control, 2003) here dutifully enumerates John Travolta's film roles, gourmet meals, real-estate purchases and assorted aircraft in a headlong gush of infotainment clichés and tortured syntax. Travolta's story—adored, spoiled scion of a close-knit, showbiz-mad family experiences early success, a string of failures and a series of comebacks—lacks dramatic punch: Even at his lowest points, Travolta remained financially solvent and avoided drugs and alcohol. Mostly, he sulked and over-ate. While Travolta has worked with Robert Altman, Terrence Malick, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma and Mike Nichols, Clarkson has not included a single interesting fact regarding any of these collaborations. We do hear from Danny Terrio. Sorry, film fans. As for analysis of Travolta's craft, Clarkson gamely offers, “all the characters he’d played had become a part of John’s psyche—he was the ultimate chameleon.” Despite Clarkson's puzzling insistence on Travolta's supreme “coolness,” the actor comes off as a dimwitted manchild, gluttonous for sweets and credulous to the point of grotesquerie; Clarkson gingerly handles the controversial subject of Travolta's zealous devotion to Scientology with the dispassion of a man renting a pornographic movie. Clarkson does provide some incidental amusement with the narrative's very ineptness, admiringly comparing Travolta to Mussolini and describing the actor as “a great deliverer of lines” and, two pages later, as having `never been great with lines.` He locates Travolta's hometown of Englewood, N.J., in “Middle America,” and helpfully identifies superstar George Clooney as “now the star of TV’s E.R. and Quentin Tarantino’s blockbuster From Dusk Till Dawn.” Facts recur pointlessly throughout the book, as if the author had forgotten he mentioned them earlier. Best of all, Clarkson repeatedly refers to Travolta's villainous character Terl from the catastrophic science fiction stinker Battlefield Earth as “Teri.”
Travolta deserves a serious book. This is not it.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-84454-125-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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
SEEN & HEARD
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