A cartoonish biography of the eccentric comedian (currently the subject of a Milo— Forman biopic starring Jim Carrey) whose edgy, humorless, often hostile performances were considered avant-garde when he died of cancer at age 35 in 1984. Following Andy Kaufman Revealed!, a memoir by Kaufman sidekick Bob Zmuda (1999), journalist and Sinatra biographer Zehme (The Way You Wear Your Hat, not reviewed) asks whether the comedian’s bizarre characterizations, wrestling matches with women, and peculiar obsessions (transcendental meditation, Elvis Presley, chocolate ice cream, conga drums, sexual marathons with prostitutes) were the work of a rare, iconoclastic genius or the result of an undiagnosed mental illness. The answer, it would seem, is a little of both. In early childhood, Kaufman grew sullen when his Long Island mother gave some of her attention to his two younger siblings. Identifying with his showboating grandfathers and the heroes of children’s TV programs, young Andy began to entertain at neighborhood birthday parties. His success, along with his enthusiasm for all things Elvis, brought him to Manhattan, where he emerged from the city’s comedy clubs to practice his trademark annoying stunts. His reading of The Great Gatsby in an effete British accent, his inept “foreign man” (who later became Latka Grava on the TV sitcom Taxi), and his repugnant Las Vegas lounge-singer character shocked audiences who weren’t sure whether what they were seeing was a bad act or subversively clever performance art. Zehme shows how Kaufman, not content with the fame his TV appearances brought him, alienated many who wanted to help him before he died—a nonsmoking victim of lung cancer—as his fame and fortune were ebbing. Funny and tragic, as any comedian’s story must be—even if Zehme holds his subject at arm’s length, implying that a closer look might be too unsettling for Kaufman’s fans. (First serial excerpt rights to Rolling Stone)
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-33371-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
