Sedate stuff from an actor and writer who is normally anything but.
Hyperactive monologist and character actor Leguizamo provides the narrated tour of his life.
It's difficult to reconcile this plain and tired string of well-rehearsed anecdotes with the livewire, mercurial actor who can always be counted on to spark up the screen or stage. Maybe he just put so much into his legendary biographical one-man shows that there was nothing left. Born in Bogotá to high-drama parents whose ethnic blend included Italian, Colombian, Native American and Lebanese, Leguizamo grew up in Queens and knew early on that he wanted to be a performer. As just one of many class clowns in high school, Leguizamo had to work hard to stand out—there was so much competition to sit at the funniest cafeteria table that he would start writing jokes the day before. A couple plays at the renowned Public Theatre led to a stereotypical part as a gangster on Miami Vice, just one of many compromises the aspiring actor had to make in the ’80s, a lean time for Latino performers: “You'd see the same guys at every audition: me, Benicio del Toro, Benjamin Bratt, Luiz Guzman.” More roles followed, as well as Leguizamo's one-man show, Mambo Mouth, the first of four semi-autobiographical shows that incorporated satirical skits and traded heavily on family drama. For fans, there is interesting material related to behind-the-scenes melodramas on movies like Moulin Rouge and Summer of Sam, and even bombs like Super Mario Brothers. But most of the engaging stuff has already been covered in his quartet of live shows, and there's little left to go over but some dully related and thinly conceived pronouncements on film and life that wouldn't sound out of place on a DVD commentary.
Sedate stuff from an actor and writer who is normally anything but.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-052071-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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