Up-and-down humor and intermittently engaging storytelling that falls short of the author’s capabilities.
The actor, humorist, and podcast host reflects on his Hollywood status and beyond.
In this follow-up of sorts to Vacationland (2017), Hodgman continues his storytelling journey through recent career and personal life experiences. The title references his frequent flier program attached to his favorite airline. His obsession with the accumulating airline perks serves as a continuing metaphor within this loosely constructed narrative. “These stories are about my life and jobs in Hollywood ‘Workland,’ while I was briefly welcome in that country,” writes the author. “But there’s no hiding that these really are stories about fame, and especially its dwindling. They are stories about the many different kinds of gifting lounges, private parties, and secret societies I was given entrance to just because I was on television sometimes, and to which I am no longer invited….” Throughout, Hodgman shares anecdotes about his varied, often amusing experiences working in show business. Early on, the author’s humor fails to make an impact, often feeling forced, but the narrative improves as it moves along. In describing his desperate quest to receive a party invite while staying at the trendy Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, he offers wry insights into Hollywood’s ranking system. Much of Hodgman’s best writing involves his non-Hollywood experiences. In the humorous and surprisingly poignant chapter “This Was All Optional,” he recounts his 18-year relationship with his curmudgeonly cat, who had to be put down. In “Two Buildings in Florida,” the author chronicles his tour through Florida with the Boston Pops, taking detours to one of the headquarters of Scientology and Mar-a-Lago. “A Stranger Comes to Town” recounts his experiences as a part-time resident in rural Maine along with the quirky perks of becoming a well-grounded community member. A dry-witted and meandering writing style seems to have become Hodgman’s trademark, and his latest will appeal most to his devoted readers.
Up-and-down humor and intermittently engaging storytelling that falls short of the author’s capabilities.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56110-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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