For die-hard movie buffs and Spacek fans only.
An average memoir from the renowned actress.
Beginning with her childhood in Quitman, Texas, Spacek then chronicles her move to New York City after high school to pursue a singing career. During her time in the city, she subsisted on part-time work and help from her parents. She played the guitar and sang at a local bar and took classes at the Lee Strasberg Actors’ Studio. After filming her first movie, Prime Cut (1972), Spacek moved to Los Angeles. She was then cast in Terrence Malick’s classic Badlands (1973), where she met her future husband Jack Fisk, who was the art director of the movie. The memoir then recalls Spacek’s life during and after her big break as the lead actress in Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976). After winning an Oscar for the role of country singer Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Spacek took a self-imposed hiatus and moved to the country to enjoy nature, horses and a calm family life. Even though she made family life her priority, she continued to act in movies while raising her daughters; Spacek almost always brought her entire family on set. She returned to acting in the ’90s and won an Oscar nomination for her role in Todd Fields’ In the Bedroom (2001). Much of this overly detailed book lacks a narrative arc, but the author comes off as truly down-to-earth, a value she preaches throughout the book. As the title states, the book is “ordinary” and does not have enough drama to engage readers not directly interested in Spacek and her work.
For die-hard movie buffs and Spacek fans only.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2436-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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