For a far more compelling dissection of Tarantino and his contemporaries, see Sharon Waxman’s excellent Rebels on the...
Super-uncool biography of the supercool filmmaker.
The groundbreaking impact of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) certainly make Tarantino a worthy subject for a full-length portrait, and his oddball backstory—learned film history at a geeky video store; betrayed, then (sort of) reconciled with early associates—provides good fodder. Regrettably, prolific celeb-unauthorized biographer Clarkson (John Travolta: King of Cool, 2006, and many more) makes uninteresting use of both life and art. The author spends an inordinate amount of time recounting Tarantino’s upbringing in a broken home and youthful taste in movies; while mildly interesting, this material isn’t nearly as compelling as his film career. The likely reason for this imbalance is that Clarkson’s best source was Tarantino’s eager-to-chat mother, Connie Zastoupil. The remainder of the director’s story is told primarily via previously published material and author analysis. Clarkson surveys Tarantino’s career competently enough; his critical perceptions range from uninspired to lame, as when the author compares Tarantino to Vanilla Ice for their respective use of “sampling.” Further, the book all but ends in 2004, glossing over, for instance, Tarantino’s production work on the horror flick Hostel in 2005 and his 2007 exploitation-flick homage with Robert Rodriguez, Grindhouse. For that matter, the two Kill Bill films (2003 and 2004), not as resonant as his early films but still highly enjoyable, receive what could generously be called a cursory discussion.
For a far more compelling dissection of Tarantino and his contemporaries, see Sharon Waxman’s excellent Rebels on the Backlot (2005), which offers three vital qualities sorely lacking here: access, context and insight.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84454-366-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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