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 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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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