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Dropped Names: Famous Men And Women As I Knew Them (2012)

by Frank Langella(Favorite Author)

3.5 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0062094475 (ISBN13: 9780062094476)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Harper

review 1: I only got halfway through this one. It was recommended by our librarian after I shared how much I enjoyed a Frank Langella movie: "Robot and Frank". I started out really liking it, and read the most pages in my first sitting. I like that each chapter is devoted to a certain person, and whether that experience or encounter with them was for a brief moment or carried on over the course of years was fun to discover. It just started getting tedious, like I was studying, because if I was unfamiliar with a person I'd Google them and spend too long looking at photos and reading online. Another thing that started to confuse and then bore me was all of the homosexual near-encounters or one-sided attractions, or just plain way too much homoerotic-ness in general; I mean, I ha... moreve nothing against homosexuals but in a recent interview I saw with Boy George, he really summed it up the best...he said yes, he has been gay forever but doesn't really go around talking about it or putting too much focus on it, "My being gay only takes up a couple of hours a month" and there's just so much more going on in his world than his sex life. LOVE THAT! So, for Frank Langella it seems to take a lot more than a couple of hours per month, PLUS he was married with 2 children in most of this book, living the life of a straight man. No straight guy I have ever known would write this much about gay guys! I abandoned after the chapter on Raul Julia and if you read it, you'd know why. Just tiresome. Still love you, Frank. "Robot and Frank" was amazing, and I'll always be in awe of his ability to have held me so amazingly transfixed in "Frost Nixon", because I am about as politically unaware and apathetic as they come.
review 2: OK... this was kind of a guilty pleasure. A gossipy download of all the folks that Frank Langella's crossed paths with throughout his career. Have always liked him since seeing him in the stage production of Dracula, back in the 70s, so couldn't resist picking this one up. Still, he does an excellent job of sharing these vignettes with the skill of a good story teller, and with a level of class. It was a fun and interesting read, with a sort of Forrest Gump quality to it (he even makes that reference of himself). Very surprising to see how his life intertwined with all those others. less

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