Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain
Charles Leerhsen
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain
Charles Leerhsen
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Grittier than anything we've read about [Bourdain] before.
Leerhsen chooses to view Bourdain chiefly through the lens of his suicide. Throughout the book, different aspects of Bourdain’s life and personality are cast as foreshadowing his end.
A solidly researched and, despite its press, not especially lurid biography, Down and Out in Paradise has a stubborn resistance to psychologizing its subject that—along with the use of such antique terms as 'the boob tube' and 'red-blooded American male'—gives it a dated air. It reads as if it were written in 1999.
... an engrossing, penetrating, but often bleak book whose candour crosses the line into something uncomfortable. For example, Leerhsen uses Bourdain’s final messages with Asia Argento, the Italian actor with whom he had an unhappy and increasingly one-sided romance at the time of his death, as an epigraph, which feels tasteless.
Leerhsen seems to channel his subject's exuberant spirit, spiking his pages with Bourdainian swagger and a drizzle of lawlessness.
Leerhsen shares salacious details, but with an air of respect toward his much-beloved subject. Those looking for insights into the troubled relationship between Bourdain and Italian filmmaker and actress Asia Argento will find plenty of material here. Through Leerhsen’s detailed narrative, Bourdain’s life reads like a cautionary tale of a man who wished for something—and got it..
Irreverent.
This razzmatazz biography zips along nicely.