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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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