Moore’s madcap vibrancy and zest for outdoor life permeate this unpretentious chronicle.
The NESN/ESPN personality chronicles his rise from penury to the big (well, bigger) time as host of two top-rated fishing programs.
Moore and his four siblings were raised in rural Massachusetts by a doting mother and a competitive, Civil War–obsessed father. (Family vacations were spent touring historic battlefields.) Exuberant and acquisitive from an early age, young Charlie owned a brand-new Corvette at 18 and married high-school sweetheart Angela at 20. Virtually broke, the couple temporarily moved in with Angela’s parents…and stayed several years. With two kids and another on the way, Moore was bounced by his father from the family cigar store and tried unsuccessfully to open a bait shop. At this lowest of low points, he put his “people person” skills to good use and pitched himself as a fishing expert to the brass at New England Sports Network (NESN). They gave him a biweekly five-minute segment on the sports magazine show Front Row, and after some rather wooden initial performances he eventually warmed up enough to let his natural comedic panache, vast knowledge and genuine love of freshwater fishing shine through on camera. He got his own NESN show, Charlie Moore Outdoors, then moved to ESPN for the competition-themed Beat Charlie Moore. Initial reaction to the latter was mixed—Moore’s in-your-face personality wasn’t to everyone’s taste—but visits from a slew of sports and rock celebrities (and a cameo by Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney) beefed up ratings. As well as tracing his personal journey, the dedicated family man imparts sage wisdom on preserving domestic bliss and achieving success (tenacity in both cases). He also catalogues the best ways to cast a line, favorite fishing spots and the contents of his tackle box. The author’s crowning glory, he claims, was being inducted into the New England Sports Museum.
Moore’s madcap vibrancy and zest for outdoor life permeate this unpretentious chronicle.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37472-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
Great idea: Take one of America's top jazz singers, who also happens to be a good writer (Traps, the Drum Wonder, 1991), and have him write about the singers and musicians who influenced him. Unfortunately, the end result is disappointing and frustrating. TormÇ had the good fortune to grow up in an era of great singers, songwriters, arrangers, and instrumentalists. More important, it was also an era of live radio broadcasts and increased fidelity in recording techniques. As he makes abundantly clear in this text, the phonograph was his conservatory, with radio serving as a practicum and the movies and Broadway as sources of extra-credit assignments. As a result, the influences on his musical style range far and wide, from Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald to Mabel Mercer and sax players Georgie Auld and Gerry Mulligan. In the book's best moments, he deftly describes a singer's style in a few quick brushstrokes; his descriptions of Louis Armstrong on a bandstand or Crosby at a mike are little gems that capture a moment and a style. However, too much space in this slender volume is wasted on biographical data or irrelevancies like a long list of people who dubbed vocals for Hollywood's non- singers. TormÇ is capable of better, more extended analysis, as the excellent section on the underappreciated Lee Wiley shows. He is also a pretty fair prose stylist, despite a glaring mixed metaphor in his discussion of Richard Rodgers, whose ``iron-clad melodies...stuck to your ribs.'' That sounds like a painful experience indeed. This book would have been much better if TormÇ had concentrated more on the music.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-509095-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An amiably ungrandiose, entertaining memoir of TV's Batman by the Caped Crusader himself. Aided by thriller writer Rovin (co-author of The Red Arrow, 1990), West devotes the first quarter of the book to his youth in Walla Walla, Wash., his eclectic early acting career in the thespian un-center of Honolulu, and his move into Hollywood westerns, at which time he jettisoned his birth name of Billy West Anderson. Selected in 1965 to play Batman, the actor prepared by reading novels whose heroes had dual identities, such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, and by scouring 1940s ``Batman'' comic books, trying to make his character ``as plausible as a superhero can be.'' West recalls how producers saved money by using sound-effects cards—``POW''—in place of transition shots, how he improvised the ``Batusi'' into a dance craze, and how difficult it was to shed his tight-fitting outfit on the way to the ``Batroom.'' He repeats his defense of the show as hard-working farce to critics who disparaged it as camp and his response to watchdog groups who suggested the crime-fighting team was gay (``Aunt Harriet wouldn't allow it''). He also offers thumbnail sketches of the actors who played show's villains, including the tormentingly sexy Julie Newmar as Catwoman, the distinguished Cesar Romero as the Joker, and the good-natured Liberace, miscast as an evil twin. After the show went off the air in 1968, West retreated into smaller roles and ``Batman'' nostalgia. While the actor hints that his Bat-fame gained him a good deal of recreational sex, he modestly leaves out the salacious details. Of the 1989 film version starring Michael Keaton, he observes that it showed ``an emotionally scarred Batman'' and regrets he wasn't offered the role. It won't make anyone cry ``Holy Publishing Event,'' but there's good fun for Batfans.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-425-14370-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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