A mixed bag but worth reading. Those who do will be inspired to give Pryor’s concert films fresh screenings.
Biography of the comedic genius, anticipating the authors’ in-the-works film script on Pryor’s work and hard times.
Pryor was a careful autobiographer, as witness the revelations in his popular concert films from the early 1980s. He was also a brilliant improviser and actor who would single-handedly “populate his stages with upward of eight or ten characters who he permitted to flirt with, mock, con, love, hate, enchant, and begat each other.” The Henry brothers, one a screenwriter, the other a music producer, do not add materially to what Pryor has told us about himself, except to note that his frequent protestations that he had quit drugs were lies. Indeed, on many matters, they rely too heavily on the memoirs of Pryor’s ever-patient friend Paul Mooney. What adds value to this book is the authors’ expert sociological constructions, some of which they do not follow as closely as they might have. For instance, it is a noteworthy observation (though not original to the Henrys) that Pryor, more than any other single source, may have brought the “N-word” into common usage in popular culture; they could have explored it more. Along the way, they venture useful notes on the influence of Dick Gregory, the frequent betrayals (including Pryor’s assumption that Mel Brooks was going to cast him as the sheriff in Blazing Saddles, a good bit of which Pryor wrote), and of course, Pryor’s incessant drinking, drug use and sad demise. The book is a touch slapdash at times—the spelling is Sandy Koufax, not “Kofax”; someone from Wales is Welsh, not “Welch”; Moms Mabley never worked a room clean if she could help it—but it’s mostly insightful and often entertaining all the same.
A mixed bag but worth reading. Those who do will be inspired to give Pryor’s concert films fresh screenings.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61620-078-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
PROFILES
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
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