Outspoken, honest commentary of what it's like to be Princess Leia on and off the screen.
How playing Princess Leia changed the author’s life.
When Fisher (Shockaholic, 2012, etc.) accepted the role at age 19, she had no idea the Star Wars franchise would become such a phenomenon. In her mind, like so many others, the original movie was "a cool little off-the-radar movie directed by a bearded guy from Modesto….It wasn't supposed to do what it did—nothing was supposed to do that. Nothing ever had.” In this frank, self-deprecating memoir, the author rehashes her thoughts about her brief and exciting affair with married co-star Harrison Ford, which lasted the duration of the filming of Star Wars, about three months. However, readers in search of the nitty-gritty details of their weekends together won't find them here; Fisher is discreet, leaving much of the physicality of their shared experiences to the imagination. What she does provide are excerpts from her diaries written at the time, which show the naiveté of a 19-year-old in love with her older counterpart, as well as some poorly written love poems. After that overly long section, the author divulges what it’s like to attend conventions where she's paid to sign photographs of her younger self, often snapshots of Princess Leia in her metal bikini sitting beside Jabba the Hutt. Fisher successfully imitates the gushing conversations of various fans, giving insight into the complicated push-pull reality of being a celebrity: you need them to buy your signature so you can pay your bills while at the same time selling a tiny bit of your self-worth, which eventually drains you. Those looking for details about the filming of the Star Wars movies or Fisher's affair should look elsewhere, but those who want to understand the dynamics and personality of a young woman thrust into unexpected stardom and how that shaped the woman she has become will find plenty to ponder here.
Outspoken, honest commentary of what it's like to be Princess Leia on and off the screen.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17359-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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