An absolute must for any Buffy or Angel fan.
The oral history of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
Gross and Altman (The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, 2016, etc.) follow up on their successful two-volume oral history of an iconic work of American popular culture with a similarly organized book on an iconic TV show. They bring together hundreds of comments from actors, directors, writers, and producers to tell the story of Buffy and its spinoff, Angel. In 1992, Joss Whedon wrote the screenplay for the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer because he wanted to see a movie in which a blonde girl confronts a monster in an alley and “kicks its ass.” That movie flopped. When the director, Fran Rubel Kuzui, asked Whedon later if he had any interest in reprising the story for the fledging WB station, he agreed. Whedon wanted Buffy to be both an ordinary teenage girl and a powerful slayer: “I want the show to be remembered as a consistently intelligent, funny, emotionally involving entertainment that subtly changed the entire world—or a small portion of pop culture.” It did just that for seven years and 144 episodes. Inevitably, repetition occurs throughout the book as different participants describe similar material, but there is plenty of insider information and trivia to please fans. Whedon had always thought of himself as Buffy’s friend Xander but later realized, “Oh, I was Buffy! The whole time.” Sarah Michelle Gellar had auditioned for the role of Cordelia (who they originally thought would be black), but Whedon knew she’d be perfect as Buffy: “I think if we hadn’t found Sarah, the series might not have happened or lasted.” Nearly half of the book deals with Angel. Although Whedon—who moved on to Firefly—wasn’t closely involved, it found success for five years and 110 episodes. Surprisingly, neither series won an Emmy or Golden Globe award.
An absolute must for any Buffy or Angel fan.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12892-8
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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