Anyone except the most devoted Housewives fans will wish that Cohen were less talkative.
The Bravo network executive who green-lighted the Real Housewives franchise shares backstage insights into reality TV.
In this uneven memoir/gossip fest, Cohen attempts to strike a balance between the story of his upbringing in a close-knit Jewish family and dishing on the antics of “Bravolebrities.” In the former, he often succeeds, portraying his parents as warmly and humorously as you would expect from someone who implored his mom to send him updates on All My Children while he was away at camp. Cohen’s youthful obsession with soap maven Susan Lucci further highlights his eventual lionizing of the Real Housewives, and he sprinkles his awkward encounters with his diva idol throughout the text. He also effectively captures the fear of coming out in the 1980s, a time when homophobic jokes and AIDS misinformation were rampant. Cohen is candid, but he will try many readers’ patience with his devotion of several pages to the most mundane details of the Housewives’ fame-mongering: e.g., tweets from their dogs, transcripts of interviews gone awry and defenses of their shallowness that ring—surprise!—hollow. In one tortured instance, he reveals how the Bravo team recut all episodes of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills after a participant’s husband committed suicide, then claims that what they presented on TV was “real life.” The disclosure that the film crew shoots 85 hours of footage for every hour aired gives the lie to the claim that reality TV is any such thing. By the time that Cohen’s father tells him, “I just can’t get over that people speak to each other this way, in public places,” most readers will agree and likely stop reading.
Anyone except the most devoted Housewives fans will wish that Cohen were less talkative.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9583-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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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