Endless Highway

With warmth, humor, and tremendous insight, Carradine provides an honest, in-depth look at his life, from his transitional youth as the son of a renowned Shakespearean actor to his membership in the San Francisco group that spawned the Beat Generation to the path in the '70s that ulimtately led him to Kung Fu and his involvement with Eastern spiritual philosophy. Photos. Self-indulgent, highly anecdotal memoir from the actor best known for the television series Kung Fu. Carradine inherited the performing gene; by the time of his birth on December 8, 1936, his father, John, was already a successful character actor in the movies. John left David's mother when the boy was six, creating two alcoholic, dysfunctional families between which David shuttled until he was old enough to create his own troubled environment. Carradine is frank about his drug use and drinking as well as his several marriages and many liaisons, most notoriously a quintessentially '60s union with actress Barbara Hershey that produced a son they named Free (the boy, understandably, later changed his name to Tom). He says little of interest about his career, which hasn't been especially dazzling in any case--though from the author's self-important pronouncements you'd never know that he'd been in one hit (Kung Fu), one artistic success (the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory), and string of trashy exploitation films. Despite the countercultural trappings, in recounting his adventures Carradine favors the a-story-for- every-occasion approach beloved by actors for centuries; for someone who took as much LSD as he did, he's remarkably unintrospective. A few token anecdotes involving such bigger names as Bob Dylan seem to have been tossed in for commercial purposes, though his comment about Ingmar Bergman is mildly amusing (``It's hard to describe what it was like to work for Ingmar . . . the closest I can come is to say that [it] was exactly like being a character in an Ingmar Bergman movie''). Another problem is Carradine's delusion that readers will be as fascinated by his life's trivia (including mediocre song lyrics and descriptions of various cars) as he is. A few good stories, but in general the titular adjective is all too apt: endless, indeed. Endless Highway provides a raucous ride down the road that has been David Carradine's life. The son of a world-renowned Shakespearean actor, Carradine's early years were spent being shuttled from mother to estranged father to relative to boarding school to reformatory. Spontaneity, quick-wittedness, and ingenuousness were his guideposts in life, and he quickly learned that creativity was survival. The fifties found him in San Francisco among the original members that spawned the Beat Generation, and his path through the drug-flooded sixties and seventies ultimately led him to "Kung Fu," the show that helped launch an Eastern spiritual philosophy into Western culture. Writing with warmth, humor, and tremendous insight, Carradine provides an honest and in-depth look at his life. Had Holden Caulfield grown up, met Hunter S. Thompson, gone on the road with Jack Kerouac, and finally studied with Master Po - well, perhaps that would embrace the spirit of Carradine's own writing style. He has been, in his own words, fraud, genius, holy man, movie star, martyr, monster, fool, hero, whore, neurotic, poet, burnout, beauty, beast - but always a legend. The actor shares his memories of childhood and career, from his difficulties as son of the world-renowned Shakespearean actor to his devotion to the practice of kung fu and Shaolin philosphy Carradine, the son of a Shakespearean actor, traces his life from a disrupted childhood, through the Beat generation and the sixties to the television show "Kung Fu."