A breezy memoir of 45 years in television by a lady who's seen it all and is still in there pitching. For many years of her career, Betty White appeared to be one of those uniquely television-made stars: someone who was famous purely for being famous. It wasn't until she created the unforgettable role of Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show that the world saw the remarkable comic actress who was lurking behind the perennial game show contestant. White has a great idea for this autobiography: She tells her life story as reflected in the history of television, a medium she was a part of from its very earliest days. Her first major break, in 1949, was a daytime local Los Angeles show, Hollywood on Television, on which she was required to ad-lib for a staggering five and a half hours a day, six days a week. And yet she found the experience a complete pleasure and moved easily onward to sit-coms, game shows (she eventually became the first female host), variety shows, and more. Throughout, she frequently comments on how what she did would be done in TV today, and envisions the future of the medium. Her private life takes a secondary role here, although her love for husband Allen Ludden is sweetly displayed. Unfortunately for this surprisingly lengthy book, not every anecdote is as engrossing as White seems to think; she gives equal weight to her parade-hosting appearances and her Emmy-winning performances. Still, the actress comes across as good company: a gracious woman with an unkind word for no one. A likable if long-winded autobiography from a justifiably well-loved personality. (b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80042-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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 engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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