by Chris Elliott ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2012
Fans of Elliott’s work will welcome this wacky, fictionalized narrative; others should steer clear.
Comedian and actor Elliott (Into Hot Air, 2007, etc.) spoofs his own life, mixing fact and fiction in this "unauthorized biography."
The author begins with an account of his 1984 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, when Elliott’s name first became known. Working back in time from that event, he poses questions about his life and career—e.g., was he just a pampered child of celebrities seeking attention? “In order to attempt to answer these questions, we must go through his life chronologically and in excruciating detail, at least for long enough to fill about two hundred pages, most of which will have to be padded with a lot of childhood anecdotes and pop psych speculation,” he writes. Readers learn how, as a young boy, Elliott absorbed the local characters surrounding him on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, “squirreling them away for later retrieval.” Including a bout with hysterical blindness, an encounter with Jackie Kennedy at the infamous East Hampton Grey Gardens, surviving a shipwreck and washing up on Marlon Brando’s private island (where Brando passed on the arts of acting and lovemaking), Elliott continues to spin his tale to greater lengths of absurdity. The author bumps up against mobsters like John Gotti, who secured Elliott a gig as a tour guide at Rockefeller Center. Interwoven with the fictional events are a few facts concerning the author’s career, but it becomes a tiresome chore sorting the fictional fluff from the real-life episodes.
Fans of Elliott’s work will welcome this wacky, fictionalized narrative; others should steer clear.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15840-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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by Chris Elliott & illustrated by Amy Elliott Andersen
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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