An engaging account about the way unhealthy entanglements can affect an actor’s life.
A debut memoir recounts a tumultuous rise from troubled child to working actor.
It’s bad enough to find out your wife is cheating on you with your best friend on the set of the television show where you work. It’s even worse when your boss, Shonda Rhimes, has to spell it out for you. That’s exactly what happened to Short on the set of the hit show Scandal, where he was a series regular. He was so devastated by the reveal that he tried to walk into traffic; it was only through the intervention of his co-stars that he was prevented from doing so. The event was the climax of a series of ups and downs that had plagued the author throughout his life. He was born while his mother was awaiting trial for shooting and killing his father, a Kansas City police officer. “That might sound wild,” Short explains, “but you’d also have to know that my father was an extremely crooked cop. He ran in the streets, he had a drug ring, a prostitution ring….My mother was the good girl dating the bad guy, and eventually it caught up to her.” From his mother’s serial relationships to his own fraught romantic entanglements—exacerbated by substance abuse—the author’s troubled life didn’t keep him from achieving success. But it did threaten to destroy that success once he found it. Short’s prose is conversational and fluid, and he employs it in spinning just the sort of celebrity stories that readers expect. Here, he describes his advisory role in the career of Britney Spears: “ ‘Larry, hear me out,’ I told him. ‘Didn’t Britney just kiss Madonna at the MTV Awards?’ Obviously, the answer was yes. ‘Put Madonna on the record, and it’s gone. It’s out of here!’ ” The book moves quickly and demands little of readers. While hardly a life-altering read, Short’s work—written with Mendez—offers a good mix of show-business memoir, recovery narrative, and barroom-style yarns. By the end of it, it’s clear that he is grateful for the lessons learned, and readers will have at the very least been entertained.
An engaging account about the way unhealthy entanglements can affect an actor’s life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73330-410-8
Page Count: 243
Publisher: Kingston Imperial
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.
Daytime television’s most recognizable actress digs deeper in this second memoir.
Her career-defining, four decades–long stint on the daytime soap All My Children as the villainous Erica Kane has made Lucci a recognizable household name in daytime television circles. In this sophomore effort, comprised of a vivid and engaging collection of anecdotes and adventures, the actress reveals more intimate details of her struggles as well as her personal life and professional career. From the time she began performing in high school stage musicals, Lucci admits to always wanting to be onstage. Working through chronic shyness, her self-motivation and spirit drove her to pursue an acting career despite the many disappointments, callous dismissals, and various roadblocks that stood in her way. She expresses an open admiration for her parents, fellow performers who mentored her up the Hollywood ladder, and Muhammad Ali, who “owned his excellence,” as models of inspiration. Other sections reflect on her time as a working mother, the tricks to “growing old gracefully,” and how her faith, quest for joy, love of reading, and zest for life continue to sustain her. In an effort to create a more balanced memoir, Lucci also opens up to candidly share several sad and unsavory moments like being told she should probably abandon a career in television because she was too “ethnic looking”; the devastating day All My Children was canceled; the near loss of her son, Andreas, as an infant; and the feeling, upon the death of her husband, Helmut, in 2022, that the light within her “had gone out forever.” However crushing these events in her life were, they were counterbalanced with uplifting triumphs and only served as motivators to continue pushing forward to seek out the success and happiness she knew she deserved. With verve and perseverance, Lucci gleefully boasts about her starring roles in off-Broadway hits and concurrent film roles, yet, in her late 70s, she remains deeply grateful and humble and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798874868284
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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