"Don't give him fucking coke!" So screams John Belushi's wife Judy on the first page of this enervating, pointless docu-drama. And that's how it goes for over 400 pages: working from interviews with 267 people, Woodward offers—without shape, depth, or viewpoint—the dankly depressing, morbidly detailed life of John Belushi, comic actor and (above all) epic drug-user. After a disproportionately brief chapter on his early background, campus cut-up Belushi is suddenly in 1971 Chicago with the Second City comedy troupe; he and girlfriend Judy are into drugs; by page 58 he's in N.Y., in the comedy-revue hit Lemmings. ("He was the star of the show for sure, indelibly certified in the newspaper of record, the New York-fucking-Times.") And then it's on to Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970s, as the pace slows to a crawl in order to document each drug-deal, each snort, each backstage wrangle. Envious of Chevy Chase, "driven to become famous," Belushi became increasingly dependent on cocaine and Quaaludes; while Judy and others cut back on their drug habits, his escalated. Despite the loyalty of Judy (Woodward's primary source) and pal Dan Aykroyd, Belushi was insecure; there were love/hate relationships with his drug-connections, odd liaisons with Barbara Howar (maternal, platonic) and Carly Simon. (She "still loved John. His crazy, impulsive boldness broke down her acute shyness. And they were both reaching for more in their art.") The making of his feature films was to become a nightmare for all concerned—including the benumbed reader: the bomb Neighbors is followed from conception to distribution here, with minutiae and anecdotes, as if it were Gone With the Wind. And eventually, out in L.A., working on problematic movie-projects, Belushi added heroin to his fix, with the well-known fatal results. Woodward adds little to the record when it comes to Belushi's not-very-mysterious death; throughout, in fact, his investigative-journalist approach falls flat—there being nothing much worth investigating. Above all, Woodward seems to have no idea of what's involved in turning bare facts (or reconstructed dialogue) into a satisfying biography. So the result here, though scrupulously documented, is a dreary, empty chronicle, with enough real substance, perhaps, for a New York magazine article; and its audience will be limited to SNL buffs (skit transcripts, backstage tattle) and those with a passionate interest in the drug-habits of such celebs as Chevy Chase, Robin Williams, Treat Williams, Tony Curtis, Carrie Fisher, and Betty Buckley.
Pub Date: June 1, 1984
ISBN: 1451655592
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1984
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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