While clearly aimed at aspiring writers and performers, this fun, thoughtful book will appeal to aspirants in any field.
In his third book, the acclaimed actor, writer, and director examines his career through comedic and dramatic roles.
Odenkirk begins with his intention to chronicle both his successes and his failures, the latter of which constitute “a big part of my slog through the muck of showbiz….I promise that if I can ascertain a pithy truism, I’ll cough it up onto these pages so you can append it to your secret success journal.” The author follows his career from sketch comedy in Chicago to writing for Saturday Night Live and many other series in the 1990s. Odenkirk then examines his partnership with David Cross and the cult series Mr. Show With Bob and David (1995-1998), his forays into directing, and his best-known role, crooked lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and its spinoff, Better Call Saul. The roller-coaster nature of Hollywood is a consistent theme throughout, and Odenkirk hits on a sentiment that many actors and directors may share: “I tried just as hard at the stuff that didn’t work as I did at the stuff that worked.” He examines why certain projects clicked and others flopped, using both a conversational tone and the occasional direct input of others. Anyone wishing to pursue a career in entertainment, he writes, must “keep making new things in spite of every ‘no.’ To somehow stay in touch with the joy that brought you into the game.” As a writer, performer, director, and producer, Odenkirk gives a fascinating perspective on many aspects of the industry, and his explorations of his later career shift into dramatic roles—e.g., The Post in 2017, Little Women in 2019, and Nobody in 2021—are illuminating about both his own acting process and the creative work of other actors and entertainers.
While clearly aimed at aspiring writers and performers, this fun, thoughtful book will appeal to aspirants in any field.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-399-18051-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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