In ordering this book I'd hoped to learn more about Mr. Eastwood's background as a person and his motivation for the characters he's played in his films. While I have learned a little about his life and times, I've learned more about the author's point of view than Mr. Eastwood's. The author seems very focused on presenting a synopsis of every single Eastwood film without really helping me to understand what Eastwood's sense of his characters was as he portrayed them. I'm halfway through the book and thus far it seems to me that the author is presenting Mr. Eastwood as a kind of non-thinking dolt, which I've not been led prior to this book to see him as. Add to that a lot of run-on sentences that are confusing to read and some questionable syntax ("And, in the end, he gets dead." Pg. 238), mixed in with a lot of $5 words and foreign phrases, and it leaves me wondering why I'm still reading this thing. I expect to search out other bios that might help me discover Clint Eastwood more succinctly, but am likely never to touch another Richard Schickel penned volume again.

Share/Like this Review?