Fashion maven Kelly (Freakin’ Fabulous on a Budget, 2013, etc.) is more booster than basher in this collection of mostly autobiographical essays about his life on- and off-screen.
At one point late in his amiable memoir, the author, moderator of The Chew and former co-host of What Not to Wear, warns a group of graduating high school kids to “dump the fucking assholes” in their lives. That succinct yet salient exhortation sums up Kelly’s approach to life, both personal and professional. Whether chasing a lucrative career in media or a handsome suitor at the end of the bar, the former Long Island dork who always found fitting in difficult emphasizes his ongoing quest for common decency. Those wishing for a scathing takedown of the TV show he co-hosted with Stacy London for 10 years on TLC will be sorely disappointed. The most caustic Kelly gets on that score is when he concedes that he and the stylish London were like combining baking soda and vinegar: “after the fun part fizzles out, you’re left with a puddle of nothing in particular.” Southern-fried food guru Paula Deen earns a lot more of Kelly’s ire, but only after comparing him to “a turd in the punchbowl” during a live-to-tape broadcast. Usually taking the high road, Kelly recounts past love affairs, run-ins with rude diners, and correspondence from unfavorable viewers with equal, levelheaded aplomb. Kelly also displays a keen sense of slapstick comedy, hilariously portraying the time a trip to the mud baths with an old pal turned into a desperate rescue operation requiring the two childhood friends to see each other naked for the first time: “One might think I deserved a heartfelt thank-you from my oldest friend in the world. Instead, Lisa—covered in so much mud that only the whites of her eyes resembled human tissue—asked: ‘Do your balls always hang that low?’ ”
A thoroughly light and entertaining memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7693-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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