Baldwin reveals himself to be a man of parts. A pleasure for his many fans, though the sitting president doubtless won’t be...
The renowned actor and Trump bugaboo opines about filmmaking, politics, and sundry other matters in this cheerful but not entirely amiable memoir.
Baldwin grew up amid difficult circumstances: a houseful of squalling siblings, parents without resources, fraught conditions—but all of it gave him a certain freedom, since, as he writes, “my father had no money to buy things, and thus no power to manipulate us by withholding those same things.” That freedom, plus a bookish and artistic bent, led him to acting, an art that he describes as scarcely understood to outsiders and particularly to the executives in charge of film studios—which helps explain why Baldwin’s favorite venue is the stage. A generally nice but not cuddly guy in these pages, the author emerges as a careful student of film and film history, and his observations on the craft will be of particular interest to would-be actors; his reading of Steve McQueen and his minimalist acting (“Steve McQueen taught me that sometimes the trick is to do nothing at all”) alone is worth the price of admission. Baldwin can be sharp-tongued, as when he writes of one director, the daughter of David Lynch, that she “had apparently inherited his unruly hairstyle but none of his talent.” With no apparent desire to please or explain away, Baldwin also addresses head-on some of the thornier points on his resume, including the infamous voicemail he left for his young daughter and a spectacularly ugly tabloid divorce. He has much to say on current events as well, and though he is cagey on the question of running for office, he sounds a nice note for the hustings by remarking toward the end, “it is imperative that we replace those who think they own this country with those who built it.”
Baldwin reveals himself to be a man of parts. A pleasure for his many fans, though the sitting president doubtless won’t be placated—but that, Baldwin notes, is for another book.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-240970-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2017
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
