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THINGS I OVERHEARD WHILE TALKING TO MYSELF

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

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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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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