A breezy memoir of 45 years in television by a lady who's seen it all and is still in there pitching. For many years of her career, Betty White appeared to be one of those uniquely television-made stars: someone who was famous purely for being famous. It wasn't until she created the unforgettable role of Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show that the world saw the remarkable comic actress who was lurking behind the perennial game show contestant. White has a great idea for this autobiography: She tells her life story as reflected in the history of television, a medium she was a part of from its very earliest days. Her first major break, in 1949, was a daytime local Los Angeles show, Hollywood on Television, on which she was required to ad-lib for a staggering five and a half hours a day, six days a week. And yet she found the experience a complete pleasure and moved easily onward to sit-coms, game shows (she eventually became the first female host), variety shows, and more. Throughout, she frequently comments on how what she did would be done in TV today, and envisions the future of the medium. Her private life takes a secondary role here, although her love for husband Allen Ludden is sweetly displayed. Unfortunately for this surprisingly lengthy book, not every anecdote is as engrossing as White seems to think; she gives equal weight to her parade-hosting appearances and her Emmy-winning performances. Still, the actress comes across as good company: a gracious woman with an unkind word for no one. A likable if long-winded autobiography from a justifiably well-loved personality. (b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80042-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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