A breezy read through a breezy life.
The anecdotal sequel to the cult actor’s bestselling memoir.
Campbell (Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, 2005, etc.) describes this book as “part two of a three-act story,” and it often feels like a place holder, following the surprise success of If Chins Could Kill (2001) and anticipating whatever is to come. A perennially working actor in B-movies and cable series, the author explains the extended interval between his first book and this one: “like a slow-growing oak, it could take fifteen years for me to amass enough anecdotes for another autobiography.” During this time, Campbell avoided typecasting by playing both Santa Claus and a 68-year-old Elvis Presley suffering from penis cancer. He had adventures shooting movies in Bulgaria, New Zealand, and the Navajo country of New Mexico. He and his wife moved to Oregon, where he joined the Elks Lodge, whose members thought he was making fun of them when he took the pledge. “I’m an actual actor, so I’m prone to be a bit more ‘theatrical,’ ” he reassured them. Then he explains to readers, “aside from being old-fashioned and a little kitschy, the organization donates a lot of money to charity and the drinks are really cheap!” Among other discoveries, Campbell learned that Oregon culture is possibly even crazier than that in LA and that driving there is definitely more dangerous. And the secret to Hollywood? “It’s really just a big, tangled web of schmoes who keep running into each other over and over.” Fortunately, one of Campbell’s schmoes is Sam Raimi, a lifelong friend since they were kids playing with Super-8 film and later one of the highest-paid directors in the business. Through Raimi, Campbell landed bit roles in the first three Spider-Man movies. The author’s work on the Burn Notice TV series and his cult movies, including Evil Dead, have brought him a variety of fruitful opportunities, including an invitation to entertain the troops in Iraq.
A breezy read through a breezy life.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12560-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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 2025 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.
