An amusing, amiable read. Leifer wants you to love what you do and learn to move on from failures and rejections—and please,...
Career and life lessons from the would-be president of the "old girls club."
After 40 years of writing, producing and performing comedy, Leifer (When You Lie About Your Age, the Terrorists Win: Reflections on Looking in the Mirror, 2009) offers advice on succeeding in both life and show business. Rather than a career guide written by a suit who connived, hurt others or gleefully conquered them, Leifer's stories of turning failures into successes demonstrate how persistence and optimism—not to mention parents who supported her decision to drop out of college and pursue a career in stand-up comedy—have created opportunities that continued to propel her forward. The author reworks such workplace aphorisms as "Learn from the masters" and "You never get a second chance to make a first impression," into "Respect Your Yodas" and "So I Stole Soda From Aaron Spelling.” Throughout the book, Leifer comes across as your "Auntie Carol," the funny one who tells stories about the sweethearts and schmucks she has worked with throughout her career. She presents her early experiences in her stand-up career as a procession of cautionary tales and mortifying blunders, such as when she challenged a heckler in a dive bar to come up on stage if he thought he had better material—unaware that he was in a wheelchair. ("Not exactly the kind of 'rolling in the aisles' that a comedian dreams of.") She follows every story with its moral—a cornball technique, perhaps, but a surprisingly effective one, as is this memoir by a major Hollywood player filled with advice and heartfelt encouragement.
An amusing, amiable read. Leifer wants you to love what you do and learn to move on from failures and rejections—and please, always shower before a job interview.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59474-677-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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 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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