The author vacillates between theory-lite, barstool pontification and biography—but his book is sure to delight hardcore...
Prolific novelist Charyn (The Green Lantern, 2005, etc.) meditates on the life and work thus far of the controversial film auteur.
A motor-mouthed goofball, Quentin Tarantino mythologized his childhood, spinning tales of a half-Native-American hippie mother and vagabond existence. Charyn gets the real story from Mama Tarantino herself. Raised in a Los Angeles suburb as much by television and comic books as by his young, single mother, the boy was unfocused in school and dropped out at age 16. He found his Xanadu working at the now-storied Video Archives in Manhattan Beach. The “Archive Dogs,” over whom Tarantino ruled, created a makeshift film school, watching and discussing movies near-constantly. Here, Tarantino penned his breakthrough film, Reservoir Dogs, and met Roger Avary, with whom he would later share the Oscar for their Pulp Fiction screenplay. Charyn briefly chronicles these auspicious beginnings, combining biography with three streams of tangents: responses to critics’ readings of Tarantino’s work; his own readings, complete with scene analyses; and background (sprinkled with pop psychology) on Tarantino’s posse of collaborators. He sticks with this unfocused formula to explore Pulp Fiction’s runaway success and Tarantino’s subsequent three films, ending with musings on his subject’s past and future. The book is spotty and tries to be too many things at once. Still, Charyn, who teaches film part-time at the American University in Paris, has strong ideas, particularly about Tarantino’s conflation of humor and violence, and about the void that, paradoxically, forms the core of his not-so-empty cinema. Charyn successfully depicts Tarantino as a multifaceted character: an actor who has written his own perpetual role as a film director; the reincarnation of Orson Welles, with additional media savvy; a baby in a giant’s body; and an egotistical artist in possession of an odd sort of brilliance.
The author vacillates between theory-lite, barstool pontification and biography—but his book is sure to delight hardcore fans, students of Postmodern Cinema and the subject himself.Pub Date: June 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-858-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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