Something sweet, with a little spice and a lot of schmaltz: maybe not haute cuisine, but served warm it’s a good recipe for...
Venerable actor, stand-up, second banana, producer, director, and author (How Paul Robeson Saved My Life, 1999, etc.) presents additional autobiography—now, he assures us, with more fact than ever before.
Reiner reveals much of his home life, and particularly his life in showbiz, in chapters that resemble sitcom premises and blackout sketches. These disconnected episodes are, he asserts, “96 percent . . . absolutely true.” Tummeling in the Catskills or double-talking on Caesar’s Hour, from the small screen to the big one, he offers an archetypal theatrical memoir, ever benign, complete with rimshot gags, tales of “shmuckery,” and discrete references to flatulence. (To add some class to the proceedings, Reiner employs new orthography to describe the “pharts”.) Many supporting players make appearances; the cast of dozens includes Georgie Jessel, Mickey Rooney, Howie Morris, Dick (not “Dickey”) Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Max Liebman, 2,000-year-old Mel Brooks, and cherished family members, each acting with style and grace under the author’s direction. From youth in the Bronx to playing the White House, his story has few vicissitudes; Reiner seems to have progressed from “Call Me Mister” to “Call Me Mister Show Biz” with little hesitation. He’s kept the same wife, kids, and forebears he started with, and, he tells us, he’s never sued anyone or been sued, surely a record in his line of work. His father was an inventive watchmaker, he recalls, and clearly our good-natured author has inherited a nice sense of timing.
Something sweet, with a little spice and a lot of schmaltz: maybe not haute cuisine, but served warm it’s a good recipe for palatable recollections.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31104-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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
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