The flamboyant talk show host delivers an entirely expected book: a glitzy, glamorous, goofy look at 365 days of a charmed...
Cable TV’s dishiest guy at his dishy best.
Depending on whom you ask, the brainchild behind Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise and Watch What Happens Live—as well as the network’s former head of development—is either a parody of a talk show host or a true TV original. Those kinds of against-the-grain personalities generally elicit a loyal fan base, and Cohen (Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture, 2012) is no exception. In the crowded late-night landscape, his ratings remain solid, and he always lines up quality guests to do “shotskis” in his studio. His second book is a straight-up diary that his fans will relish and detractors will ignore. However, part of what makes Cohen so appealing on the page is his humility. He’s well-aware of his position as a TV anomaly and often displays a gee-whiz attitude about his brushes with fame. In discussing a particularly star-filled week on WWHL, he admits, “For Cher I was excited but with Oprah I was nervous, actually shaking for an hour before the show.” But everything isn’t campy and fabulous: The author’s story of his encounter with Conan O’Brien, in which the veteran host talked the newbie over some bumps, is almost touching, and his love for his dog is sweet and relatable. Cohen spends a lot of time discussing Housewives, so if you are not a fan of that particular franchise, parts of the narrative will drag. But not to worry: You’re never more than a page or two away from some dish about Lady Gaga, Emma Stone, David Letterman and a host of other celebrities.
The flamboyant talk show host delivers an entirely expected book: a glitzy, glamorous, goofy look at 365 days of a charmed showbiz life.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62779-228-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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