Autobiography as gaping grin—nary an honest moment to be glimpsed.
The man they called Knight Rider covers his life in standard greatest-hits format.
Even given the meager expectations aroused by celebrity autobiography—a cheery narrative arc laced with a modicum of self-deprecation and the occasional bit of gossip—this relentlessly cheery account still manages to disappoint. Known in these post-ironic days as the Hoff (the logo from a T-shirt he sells via the “Hoff World” website), Hasselhoff launched his career in 1975 when he landed a role on The Young and the Restless. He caught the eye of NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff, who put him in ’80s touchstone Knight Rider, a block of televisual cheese co-starring a snooty talking car with an oscillating red-light scanner for an eye. Next came Baywatch, at one point the most popular TV show in the world, which cemented the Hoff’s status as a world pop-culture star. Success was confirmed when he headlined cheeseball concerts that pulled in massive crowds of Europeans. While the account of his TV exploits soon bores, his story of playing to fame-dazed East Germans in 1989 offers a moment of surreal magnificence. (His song “Looking for Freedom” became an anthem of the post-Wall era.) Readers can hardly turn a bright and sunny page without seeing the Hoff grasp another great opportunity or a sick child needing a celebrity visit pick-me-up. Oh, he encounters occasional speed bumps like divorces and near-death from alcohol poisoning, but he’s soon off and running again: starring on Broadway in Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical and becoming an even odder icon with his stunningly popular SpongeBob SquarePants cameo. Nothing keeps the Hoff down, it seems.
Autobiography as gaping grin—nary an honest moment to be glimpsed.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37129-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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