by Bob Newhart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2006
More of a routine than a memoir, but full of the wry, understated self-deprecation that Newhart has perfected.
Now in his mid-70s, comedian Newhart riffs lightly on his life and career, publishing along the way portions of his most popular routines.
His book is a memoir only in the most superficial sense. There are no revelations, dark or otherwise, only an amusing and repetitive PowerPoint presentation by a writer determined to keep himself concealed. Oddly, Newhart’s observations about the art of comedy often veer close to banality—e.g., “Comedy can help us make it past something very painful like death.” He opens with some comments on comedy and comedians, then segues into chapters about his youth in Chicago. His father drank a lot; we don’t learn much about Mom. Newhart attended Catholic schools, got a bachelor’s degree in management and left Loyola’s law school sans degree. He was drafted, spent two years as an army clerk, then worked as an accountant. On the side, he wrote comedy routines, selling a few to radio stations. He lived at home until he was 29. His first comedy album (The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart) skyrocketed, as did the follow-up. The ensuing years were filled with stand-up dates in Vegas, TV shows, movies and lunches with glitterati. A treacly sequence about meeting his wife and some Erma Bombeckian pages about a disastrous family trip in a Winnebago are among the weaker sections. More interesting behind-the-scenes segments discuss his TV shows and films, especially Hell Is for Heroes and Catch-22. Playing one scene in the latter with a wicked hangover, Newhart was taken aback when director Mike Nichols declared that was exactly the quality he was looking for in the character. It’s one of the book’s many drinking stories; the author writes with less good cheer about smoking, which nearly killed him. His best friend is Don Rickles; he met Stan Laurel; he wishes he’d met W.C. Fields. He still loves doing stand-up.
More of a routine than a memoir, but full of the wry, understated self-deprecation that Newhart has perfected.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-0246-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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