Charming but slight reminiscences of a cinematic icon.
Michael Caine finds a third act.
The author’s second autobiographical work (What’s It All About?, 1992) revisits familiar territory—childhood poverty, the deprivations of World War II, faltering first steps in show business before signature roles in The Ipcress File (1965) and Alfie (1966) made him an international film star—but his warm, wry delivery keeps the material interesting, even though many of the anecdotes have a distinctly practiced feel. Caine devotes much space to his latter-day, post–leading man film career, a clear source of pride and delight for the actor who presumed, after a fallow period, that his career was effectively over in the early ’90s. The years since have found Caine doing acclaimed work in such worthy projects as The Cider House Rules (1999), The Prestige (2006), the Christopher Nolan Batman films and Inception (2010). The author is endearing in his appreciation of this unexpected phase of his career, but a little more analysis of the films, his acting process and insights into the industry would have been welcome. Instead, Caine is largely content to relate amusing stories or chivalrously praise co-stars such as Sandra Bullock. Some of the material is truly compelling—especially the disarming glimpses of the likes of Laurence Olivier and Steve Martin—but the general weightlessness of Caine’s reminiscences are a bit frustrating for the movie buff eager to plumb the memory of one of the cinema’s most distinctive stars. The author goes on at length about family crises, military experiences, his career as a restaurateur, old friendships and the like. One personal story that does resonate is Caine’s shocking late-in-life discovery of an adult half brother, institutionalized and suffering from severe brain damage, whose existence had been concealed by the author’s mother until her death. In Caine’s telling, the story would suit a small, serious film, with a juicy role for an older English actor of demonstrated range and power.
Charming but slight reminiscences of a cinematic icon.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9390-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
