An entertaining if somewhat overly anecdotal look back at a beloved weekly variety series.
The TV legend reflects on her eponymous variety series.
When the Carol Burnett Show premiered on CBS in 1967, it was the heyday for variety shows, which mixed sketch comedy with musical performances and were a staple on network TV. Though several shows from that era enjoyed high ratings for a few seasons, such as Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and the Glen Campbell Show, Burnett’s (This Time Together: Laughter and Reflection, 2010, etc.) series remained an audience favorite for an unprecedented 11 years, winning multiple Emmy awards along the way and continuing in syndication ever since. In this light, behind-the-scenes memoir, the author pays tribute to the many talented individuals responsible for the show’s enduring success, including the writers, musicians, designers, technicians, and, perhaps most significantly, her team of weekly performers and big-name celebrity guest stars. She additionally shares some of the hilarious impromptu moments on the set and sheds light on the many memorable sketches, including the movie parodies that have become classic TV. In brief, occasionally disjointed chapters, Burnett provides fascinating glimpses of the vigorous demands involved with producing her show, eventually summarizing why such shows are regretfully no longer produced on the same scale. “Sadly, variety shows like ours have gone the way of the dodo bird,” she writes. “A variety show today can never duplicate what we did. Why? Money. The cost of clearing the songs and music would sink the Titanic. Sixty to seventy costumes a week? No way. A twenty-eight piece orchestra? Twelve dancers? A rep company of five? Six to eight sketches a show? Major guest stars? Block the entire show and rehearse with the orchestra in one day? The following day tape the whole shebang in two hours? Dream on.”
An entertaining if somewhat overly anecdotal look back at a beloved weekly variety series.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90465-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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