Whatever readers believe or don’t about Andy Kaufman, this book will confirm that particular “truth.”
Another biography of the idiosyncratic comedian that will make fans question what the authors’ previous work on the subject offered and to doubt that this will really be their “final” word.
The co-authors were both very close to the late comic provocateur, as Zmuda (Andy Kaufman Revealed, 1999) was his best friend, and collaborator/writer Margulies (Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts!, 2009) was his lover and partner until his death in 1984. The book offers a split opinion on that death, with Zmuda still maintaining that it was a hoax and offering frequent conversations with Kaufman on how it could be perpetrated, while Margulies, now married, believes that the death attributed to cancer was more likely a result of AIDS: “His bisexuality would be so humdrum today that I considered not even mentioning it, but Bob and I agreed that we would be completely honest in this book, since it is most likely the last book we will write about Andy.” Zmuda, who often played Kaufman’s alter ego Tony Clifton when his friend was alive, has continued to perform as Clifton since Kaufman’s death, while blurring the line between preserving and extending Kaufman’s legacy and capitalizing on his memory. He is the primary author, with interludes from Margulies, and much of the book concerns the roles the two played in the making of Man on the Moon, starring Jim Carrey as Andy, and the tensions between the two authors and the Kaufman family over his portrayal (and memory and estate). There are some revelatory anecdotes featuring Carrey, Elton John, Hugh Hefner (who tossed Zmuda as Clifton out of a Playboy Mansion party) and others. There’s also plenty of amateur psychoanalyzing and lots of exhortation for Andy to return and reveal the hoax.
Whatever readers believe or don’t about Andy Kaufman, this book will confirm that particular “truth.”Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940363059
Page Count: 256
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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