A charming, if gently flawed, account of a performer’s intriguing journey.
A debut memoir recounts the life of an entertainer who became known as Charles the Clown.
Kraus began learning magic when he was just 10 years old, taking the train to Manhattan from whichever borough his family lived in to buy material for tricks at a specialty shop. He studied TV performers, honed his comedy chops, and started playing paid shows as a teenager. Life tugged him around the map, from attending boarding school in Massachusetts and Connecticut to serving a four-year stint in the Navy and finally landing in Los Angeles. Along the way, Kraus performed magic and comedy, sometimes opening for comedian Jay Jason while employed as his personal assistant. The author even presented magic for kids in Vietnam during his military service. In one of his best stories, he recalls answering an ad looking for variety acts for a movie called John Hoffman’s World of Talent. According to the author, he knew the film was a charade, but, being underage at the time, he forged his father’s signature to participate. While the project delivered a cautionary tale about show business, it was still a fun experience and allowed Kraus to brag he was in a movie. He was soon convinced he was not meant to be an actor after watching talented troupers at the Barn Playhouse in New Hampshire. But he could amuse adults and children. Told by a Los Angeles agent that there were too many magicians, the author accidentally found his calling as a clown. The book offers some illuminating anecdotes about performing. For example, one of Kraus’ signature bits, transforming himself into a clown in front of an audience of kids, developed because he was late to a gig and didn’t have time to dress up. So he improvised. There is true love of the craft in much of this memoir, which features black-and-white photographs, though it is long in spots and broken up awkwardly into one-paragraph chapters in others. In an early chapter, the author devotes only one paragraph to an engagement after which he had an epiphany that he didn’t need a lot of props to entertain. The scene could have been an emotional high point if given more space. Still, his passion for show business shines through brightly, and that makes this a worthy read for anyone similarly inclined.
A charming, if gently flawed, account of a performer’s intriguing journey.Pub Date: May 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-947778-37-5
Page Count: 471
Publisher: BookPatch LLC
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.
A brisk study of 20 of the Bard’s plays, focused on stripping off four centuries of overcooked analysis and tangled reinterpretations.
“I don’t really care what he might have meant, nor should you,” writes Smith (Shakespeare Studies/Oxford Univ.; Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, 2016, etc.) in the introduction to this collection. Noting the “gappy” quality of many of his plays—i.e., the dearth of stage directions, the odd tonal and plot twists—the author strives to fill those gaps not with psychological analyses but rather historical context for the ambiguities. She’s less concerned, for instance, with whether Hamlet represents the first flower of the modern mind and instead keys into how the melancholy Dane and his father share a name, making it a study of “cumulative nostalgia” and our difficulty in escaping our pasts. Falstaff’s repeated appearances in multiple plays speak to Shakespeare’s crowd-pleasing tendencies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a bawdier and darker exploration of marriage than its teen-friendly interpretations suggest. Smith’s strict-constructionist analyses of the plays can be illuminating: Her understanding of British mores and theater culture in the Elizabethan era explains why Richard III only half-heartedly abandons its charismatic title character, and she is insightful in her discussion of how Twelfth Night labors to return to heterosexual convention after introducing a host of queer tropes. Smith's Shakespeare is eminently fallible, collaborative, and innovative, deliberately warping play structures and then sorting out how much he needs to un-warp them. Yet the book is neither scholarly nor as patiently introductory as works by experts like Stephen Greenblatt. Attempts to goose the language with hipper references—Much Ado About Nothing highlights the “ ‘bros before hoes’ ethic of the military,” and Falstaff is likened to Homer Simpson—mostly fall flat.
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4854-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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