The author’s affection for his principals permeates all, brightening the dark corners and dulling the jagged edges.
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. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
PROFILES
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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