Readers will wish Greer was their conspiratorial best friend.
A memoir by a rare breed of Hollywood actress: happy, well-adjusted and working.
Greer, who has appeared in nearly 100 movies and TV roles (this is her first book), knows she is lucky. Her unconventional parents—her mother was fired from a convent before she could take her final vows as a nun—wholeheartedly supported her teenage ballet and acting aspirations, and she got cast, after her first audition, in a movie with David Schwimmer. This is not a Hollywood roman à clef; Greer doesn't dish and is amazed by and grateful for her good fortune. She embodies the role she calls "the ultimate movie best friend…funny, cute, sassy and approachable." She is so approachable, in fact, that people who believe they recognize her routinely ask, "What do I know you from?" Her initial response: "First of all, hi." During her 15-year career, she has become proficient at what she calls "fan profiling.” Eager to help, she asks, "What are you into?" and intuits by the questioner's clothes, age and sex which productions they may have seen her in. It could be from one (or several) of her wide-ranging roles, such as Arrested Development, Two and a Half Men, The Wedding Planner or 13 Going on 30. Greer is an engaging and witty storyteller, at turns wistful (of her beloved hometown, she writes, "Detroit is America's sad family member who can't catch a break") and unsparingly honest ("I used to be more ugly”). She is also willing to laugh at some of her more absurd can-you-believe-it stories—e.g., when she finally got the apartment she always dreamed of, beneath the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign, it turned out to be full of cockroaches and thieves and constantly under the watch of police helicopters.
Readers will wish Greer was their conspiratorial best friend.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53788-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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
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