Some readers may sense the complexity and darkness beneath Saget’s comedic stance, yet this memoir remains bubbly and...
Family entertainer and champion of filthy humor aims to track his two divergent voices in his memoir.
The author, best known for starring on popular TV shows Full House and America’s Funniest Home Videos, theorizes that his bifurcated approach to comedy— kid friendly for the TV audience, scatological and ribald in his stand-up—derives from an upbringing in which strong family ties were tested by illness and early deaths: “The more tragedy befell us, the more odd gallows humor I would release.” Saget discusses the difficult losses of beloved childhood uncles and, as an adult, his two sisters with a touching straightforwardness before moving on to portray his career arc, beginning with his hardscrabble initiation as a touring comic in the early 1980s: “For me it took ten years to even start to happen.” He has a long memory for the comedy veterans who were kind to him, including Johnny Carson, Richard Pryor and George Carlin, leading to many amusing showbiz anecdotes and a few off-color ones involving the likes of Rodney Dangerfield. Yet, Saget was surprised when his initial success led to being cast as “a conservative, neurotic widowed father of three” on Full House, which he admits propelled him into the cultural mainstream. Saget’s prose is frequently droll (on his concurrent success with America’s Funniest Home Videos: "I was double-teamed by family TV"), but the overall effect is one of casual impressions and a broad account of his life rather than a sharper narrative about performance or his eventual experiences producing and directing. Instead, the author frequently indulges in asides, midlife musings and advice for readers, which may produce diminishing returns for anyone who is not a die-hard fan—e.g., "Anything good is hard. But enough about my penis.”
Some readers may sense the complexity and darkness beneath Saget’s comedic stance, yet this memoir remains bubbly and superficial.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-227478-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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