TV talk-show legend Philbin reminisces about some of the important people who have impacted his impressive 50-year run.
“Rege” is not the most insightful author. Palling around with Jack Nicholson was a hoot; meeting Joe DiMaggio was a thrill; dining at home with George Clooney was a delight; etc. A few dozen strong personalities comprise the author’s pantheon of friends and heroes, but none of them, including wife and frequent TV co-host Joy, receive anything other than superficial attention. For example, Philbin’s description of his life partner: “Great face. Great figure. Wonderful personality. Charming conversationalist. All the things you want in a woman.” Chapters devoted to other potentially fascinating personalities—e.g., George Steinbrenner, Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Spielberg—run just a scant few pages, and each chapter ends with a few painfully obvious observations about “What I Took Away From It All.” Philbin, whose broadcasting career started in the late ’50s and continues today despite his recent departure from his daily morning show with Kelly Ripa, got to know hundreds of interesting people during his unparalleled tenure in TV. He apparently just didn’t know any of them that well. And perhaps that has been the secret to his enduring success. He doesn’t probe. He doesn’t pry. He’s the guy you can continually goof on and still get away with it. Others have come and gone, but the breezy Philbin is still here. What you see on TV is what you get in this book. Fans will love it; others won’t have much to contemplate.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-210975-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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