A warmhearted, revelatory composite portrait.
Actors, writers, directors, critics, and producers remember a beloved friend.
Esquire editor Carter and Vanity Fair contributing editor Kashner (When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, 2004, etc.) bring together reminiscences about filmmaker, director, and comedian Mike Nichols (1931-2014), gleaned from interview transcripts and conversations with more than 100 of his famous friends, including Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Bob Newhart, Jules Feiffer, Cynthia Nixon, and Tom Hanks. Their remarks and anecdotes, organized to chronicle Nichols’ life and career, cohere into a candid, intimate portrayal of a man they loved and admired. “I was always in awe of Mike,” Woody Allen admitted, for both his talent and charm. Many echoed Anjelica Huston in remarking on his “incredible capacity for friendship that makes you think you’re absolutely unique.” Candice Bergen, who found him intimidating at first, praised him for trying to make everyone feel comfortable: “He paid attention to you, which people of success and achievement and intellect rarely do.” Nichols long struggled with feeling like an outsider. Born Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky, he left Germany with his family in 1939, knowing no English. When he was 5, probably in response to illness, he lost all his hair, an affliction that deeply embarrassed him; as an adult, he wore specially made hair and eyebrow pieces. His career began as an entertainer; friends recall his synergy with Elaine May, who “liberated Mike’s unconscious” to inform their “side-splitting and irresistible” comedy improvisations. “God, they’re amazing,” Robin Williams once remarked. Nichols fell into depression after their split, until he was lured into directing, teaming with Neil Simon for Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. “Mike had a fabulous gift for staging, an instinct for what would work on Broadway,” Allen recalled, and a sure eye for choosing scripts and casts: Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for example, and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Nichols’ attitudes about money, fame, art, and marriage all emerge from the contributors’ wide-ranging recollections.
A warmhearted, revelatory composite portrait.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11287-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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