Occasionally overwritten, but a rich portrayal of an unconventional, free-wheeling thinker whose checkered experiences shock...
A hip biography of American actor, photographer and pop-art collector Dennis Hopper (1936–2010).
Folsom (The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld, 2009, etc.) considers Hopper as an energetic acolyte of James Dean who cultivated a renegade persona through drug abuse, sexual wildness, violence and confrontations with directors as well as other studio figures over embracing method acting when it was regarded with skepticism. Spanning Hopper's beginnings in theater to a part in Rebel Without a Cause, his ambitious project in Peru, The Last Movie and a career resurgence later in life, the author emphasizes how the actor's talent was sometimes overshadowed by his reputation—to the extent that the actor once agreed in a 60 Minutes interview that his work could be regarded as a failure with moments of brilliance. Folsom’s tendency toward extended metaphors occasionally hinders the narrative—e.g., of Hollywood legends, he writes, “Up in the firmament, outside his [Peter Fonda’s] window, Brando, Dean, and Clift twinkled in the cosmos. Marlon’s comet shone brightest. It hooked around the sun, didn’t get sucked in, and then seemed to orbit around it. A celestial navigator, Fonda watched it come, exit, it was really incredible. The tail of the comet sent showers and meteors fizzing down through the atmosphere.” There are also several other instances of purple prose, but Folsom provides frank anecdotes regarding Hopper's fellow actors, such as Natalie Wood.
Occasionally overwritten, but a rich portrayal of an unconventional, free-wheeling thinker whose checkered experiences shock and beguile on the page.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0062206947
Page Count: 352
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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