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PRYOR CONVICTIONS

AND OTHER LIFE SENTENCES

Pryor reflects on a life of humor and hard living altered forever by the recent diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Pryor has always been a fearless black man. His foul language, his willingness to address race and racism directly and intimately revolutionized comedy in the '60s and '70s and made way for comedians such as Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, and Joe Torry. But as Pryor explains here, aided by Gold of People magazine, he never equated people's laughing at his jokes with their liking him. His cocaine addiction and the escapades that addiction prompted led him on a wild road that some, like comic John Belushi, didn't survive. His addiction to women was equally as destructive. As he recounts in the book, he was married six times, twice to the same woman, with countless affairs in between. He recognized himself as ``the dark comic genius, the Bard of Self Destruction'' and calls MS ``the light'' that transforms his life, making him slow down and stop using drugs. What is so painful to read here is the way our culture's obsession with celebrity distances those who become famous from the honesty and love they once had. When Pryor had a heart attack scare, he says, ``My family worried themselves sick. They were probably closer to death than I was. They saw their money supply gasping for air, moaning and writhing in pain.'' It is even more shocking to read that his doctors offered all sorts of explanations for his heart troubles, but never once mentioned his cocaine addiction. They simply told him to take it easy. Pryor's analysis of Hollywood's reaction to him is similarly insightful. After the massive box-office success of his movie Richard Pryor: Live In Concert, he says that Hollywood rediscovered him. He wasn't black. He wasn't white. He was green. There are no big surprises here, this is not a celebrity tell- all. This is a powerful autobiography of a talented man who made every effort to ruin his body and his career and lived to tell the tale. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: May 30, 1995

ISBN: 0-679-43250-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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