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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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