by Dick Cavett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 9, 2010
Uneven but breezy, incisive and amusing—nice to have you back, Dick.
Veteran talk-show titan turns comic columnist.
Cavett (co-author: Eye on Cavett, 1983, etc.) began an online column for the New York Times in 2007, musing on current events and reminiscing about his many celebrity encounters. This slim volume collects a number of these pieces for a diverting, if slight, reading experience. All of the familiar Cavett tics are in evidence: idyllic recollections of his Nebraska boyhood, accounts of his adventures at Yale, cavils against poor grammar and the coarsening of popular culture and endless anecdotes celebrating the wit and wisdom of show-business luminaries like Richard Burton, John Wayne, William F. Buckley and, inevitably, Groucho Marx—though the reader can’t escape the impression that it is Cavett’s own way with a one-liner that is nearest to the author’s heart. This general air of self-regard is a familiar complaint about Cavett, and not unearned, but fans will find it consistent with his low-key, cozy charm. It is impossible to read his first-person prose without hearing that distinctive, sonorously buzzing voice—and, at this point in his long career, the name-dropping and “ain’t I clever” mien are part and parcel of the author’s appeal. The quality of the pieces is hit-or-miss, a perhaps unavoidable result of the column-a-week grind. The Andy Rooney–esque grouchiness over commonly mispronounced words and reflexive jabs at George W. Bush are tired tropes, but his remarkable memory abounds with surprising and touching insights into such icons as Katherine Hepburn and Richard Nixon. The highlight of the book is Cavett’s copious reconstruction of the famous installment of his late-night program in which he presided over, and became involved in, a surreally escalating contretemps between authors Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, which occasioned one of the funniest ad-libs in the author’s career, and, indeed, in the history of television itself. No wonder he likes to tell it.
Uneven but breezy, incisive and amusing—nice to have you back, Dick.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9195-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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by Dick Cavett
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Reyna Grande ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2012
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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by Joshua Davis ; adapted by Reyna Grande
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edited by Reyna Grande & Sonia Guiñansaca
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by Reyna Grande
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