For Alda devotees and fans of Robert Fulghum.
Avuncular life lessons from 70-something actor and bestselling author Alda (Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned, 2005).
Nothing requires a person to summarize the essence of a meaningful life like being asked to write a commencement address, and Alda has given plenty over the years. Here, he recalls—and includes generous excerpts of—those commencement addresses, as well as eulogies and other speeches. Each chapter ends with some sort of moral or bit of wisdom about living the good life: You should love, rather than badger, your kids. Young folks today ought not fantasize about the countercultural ’60s, but should focus on being honest, because leading a life of decency is itself revolutionary. Whatever your profession, remember the “real lives at the other end of your ministrations.” Even for the rich and famous, the really important stuff is small: searching for sea glass with children, reminding your buddies not to take themselves too seriously. Alda is at his best when describing the transcendent joy of acting. A few weeks after 9/11, he joined hundreds of Broadway actors to film a television ad, singing “New York, New York” and declaring that the city was back in business. Compared to the work at Ground Zero, filming this ad seemed trivial—yet, he writes, “this is what we do, and doing it with all the energy we could give it had lifted us up” and helped inject color into “this wounded, gray city.” Eventually, much of the advice becomes stale and bromidic, as when Alda tells his daughter to “be true to herself.” Alda’s final words of advice—and even he jokingly admits that it’s a “platitude”—are laugh a lot, let your life be an adventure and don’t make yourself crazy looking for Meaning.
For Alda devotees and fans of Robert Fulghum.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6617-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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
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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