A fast-paced, informative reminder of the importance of speaking out.
A comprehensive history of the embattled, groundbreaking variety program The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
NPR TV critic Bianculli (Dictionary of Teleliteracy: Television’s 500 Biggest Hits, Misses, and Events, 1996, etc.) traces the development of the Smothers’s act, which began in 1967 and featured the stuttering, spacey Tom and his straight-laced brother, Dick, performing acoustic folk songs interspersed with zany asides and brotherly bickering. This family-friendly act would ironically serve as a springboard for some of the most daring commentary and satire to appear in a prime-time program up to that point—a distinction that secured the Smothers’s legacy as TV pioneers and, ultimately, cost them their platform and lead to a disastrous relationship with their network, CBS. The author effectively conveys the excitement generated by the late-’60s heyday of the Comedy Hour in its young fans, as its mandate to present fresh new musical acts, including the Who and Buffalo Springfield, and to comment on social issues stood in sharp relief to the staid fare typical of the day. A fascinating cast of characters, including the writer and musician Mason Williams, faux presidential candidate Pat Paulsen, hippy love child Leigh French and irreverent monologist David Steinberg, keeps the narrative hopping, and Bianculli captures the special essence of each performer. The heart of the story concerns Tom Smothers’s epic clash with the draconian standards and practices (read: censorship) department of CBS. The author details the infamous cutting of Pete Seeger’s anti-Vietnam ballad “Waist Deep in Big Muddy,” the fallout from Steinberg’s edgy religious material and censored appearances by Harry Belafonte and Elaine May, as well as Tom’s cheeky brinksmanship and legal battles with the corporate culture at the network. It’s striking to realize how mild much of the contested material seems today, which speaks to the climate of caution and fear that ruled mainstream TV entertainment in the ’60s. The Smothers Brothers lost their show in 1969, but won victories that continue to pay dividends to this day.
A fast-paced, informative reminder of the importance of speaking out.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0116-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
