Veteran journalist de Visé (co-author, with Su Meck: I Forgot to Remember, 2014) returns with a plethora of memories about actors Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, who propelled The Andy Griffith Show to enormous popularity in the 1960s.
As the author reminds us, the show about rural Mayberry remains in the popular culture: it’s never been off the air, he writes, and Mount Airy, North Carolina, continues to profit from fans’ visits and its annual “Mayberry Days.” De Visé follows a traditional dual biography format, alternating chapters about his principals at first and then blending their stories later on: birth to death to interment to afterglow. He does little to conceal his own affection for the performers, writing about “the magic that could unfold” between the two and how Griffith, despite “whatever drama might be playing out at home…remained an impeccable professional on the set.” For many readers, this will become grating. The author doesn’t neglect the dark side of the story, though he hardly emphasizes it. Both Griffith and Knotts married three times, and both had what de Visé winkingly calls a wandering eye. Griffith drank heavily and battled physically with his first wife, and Knotts partied hard. Griffith also had an envious streak: Knotts won five consecutive Emmys on the show; Griffith won zero. We follow the rise of their careers—early on, Knotts was a ventriloquist—their meeting on the set of No Time for Sergeants, and their fast friendship, which waxed and waned and waxed again. De Visé often tells us a bit about specific episodes and about the other players in the productions (with some emphasis on Jim Nabors), and he chronicles the tougher post-Mayberry years that, for Griffith, terminated with his success on his show Matlock, which ran from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. Knotts had later success in low-budget films and with touring theatrical productions.
The author’s affection for his principals permeates all, brightening the dark corners and dulling the jagged edges.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4773-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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PROFILES
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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