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WIRED

THE SHORT LIFE & FAST TIMES OF JOHN BELUSHI

"Don't give him fucking coke!" So screams John Belushi's wife Judy on the first page of this enervating, pointless docu-drama. And that's how it goes for over 400 pages: working from interviews with 267 people, Woodward offers—without shape, depth, or viewpoint—the dankly depressing, morbidly detailed life of John Belushi, comic actor and (above all) epic drug-user. After a disproportionately brief chapter on his early background, campus cut-up Belushi is suddenly in 1971 Chicago with the Second City comedy troupe; he and girlfriend Judy are into drugs; by page 58 he's in N.Y., in the comedy-revue hit Lemmings. ("He was the star of the show for sure, indelibly certified in the newspaper of record, the New York-fucking-Times.") And then it's on to Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970s, as the pace slows to a crawl in order to document each drug-deal, each snort, each backstage wrangle. Envious of Chevy Chase, "driven to become famous," Belushi became increasingly dependent on cocaine and Quaaludes; while Judy and others cut back on their drug habits, his escalated. Despite the loyalty of Judy (Woodward's primary source) and pal Dan Aykroyd, Belushi was insecure; there were love/hate relationships with his drug-connections, odd liaisons with Barbara Howar (maternal, platonic) and Carly Simon. (She "still loved John. His crazy, impulsive boldness broke down her acute shyness. And they were both reaching for more in their art.") The making of his feature films was to become a nightmare for all concerned—including the benumbed reader: the bomb Neighbors is followed from conception to distribution here, with minutiae and anecdotes, as if it were Gone With the Wind. And eventually, out in L.A., working on problematic movie-projects, Belushi added heroin to his fix, with the well-known fatal results. Woodward adds little to the record when it comes to Belushi's not-very-mysterious death; throughout, in fact, his investigative-journalist approach falls flat—there being nothing much worth investigating. Above all, Woodward seems to have no idea of what's involved in turning bare facts (or reconstructed dialogue) into a satisfying biography. So the result here, though scrupulously documented, is a dreary, empty chronicle, with enough real substance, perhaps, for a New York magazine article; and its audience will be limited to SNL buffs (skit transcripts, backstage tattle) and those with a passionate interest in the drug-habits of such celebs as Chevy Chase, Robin Williams, Treat Williams, Tony Curtis, Carrie Fisher, and Betty Buckley.

Pub Date: June 1, 1984

ISBN: 1451655592

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1984

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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  • National Book Award Winner


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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