A mixed bag that calls for less goody-good and either more substance or more laughs.
Quondam movie actor and, latterly, deadpan TV pundit Grodin (How I Get Through Life, 1992, etc.) returns with more behind-the-scenes and in-front-of-the-camera reminiscences.
In this latest undemanding text, as before, the author never forgets a name to drop or a slight to resent. Despite his heightened sense of morality, his book has the bite and consistency of tepid oatmeal, with just a few laughs for raisins. Grodin’s on the side of niceness, of course, very high on “appropriate” behavior, and down on all “hurtful” activity. (He likes those two adjectives in particular). His high-toned agenda is certainly blameless. His sense of morality, however, is better developed than his skill at avoiding the tone of a jejune college application essay. Why, he wonders, do people behave badly? The recounting of his career as a TV performer is inoffensive material in the fan-club genre, more engaging, perhaps, than much of his previous offerings. And transcripts of televised comedy bits—like the routines with comic Jon Lovitz or vaudevillian Joey Faye—are admittedly funny. To his further credit, Chuck Grodin isn’t Don Imus. Even better, he’s the anti–Howard Stern. Those fellas have engaged in inappropriate, even hurtful activity, we are advised, while earnest Chuck, ever doing right, worked his way through cable, hosting O.J. Simpson seminars in the time slot following Geraldo. His story of the beleaguered journey from co-star with a St. Bernard to current gig as an ersatz Andy Rooney on network TV is inevitably self-serving celebrity excelsior. To be fair, maybe the author’s mind wandered a bit in the writing of this largely self-centered fluff. The reader’s mind may wander a bit, too.
A mixed bag that calls for less goody-good and either more substance or more laughs.Pub Date: May 28, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50784-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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