Some vulnerability mixed with crass, frat-boy humor.
The story of how a "white trash troublemaker" from Scottsdale created a successful career as a comedic supporting character in TV and movies.
In his first book, Spade details the years before the fame—feeling ashamed to borrow money from friends, crashing on their couches in Los Angeles and New York, accepting low-paying gigs at comedy clubs—and his disappointment even after getting the plum job for which he is perhaps best known: a cast member on Saturday Night Live. He started out as a "lowly writer/performer,” not an on-stage performer, a position he craved, and he explains how he often he felt he was “legitimately in over my head.” Nonetheless, Spade remained in the writers' room, frustrated as he was “punching up sketches that I wasn’t in (sour grapes alert).” It took several seasons before he finally found his voice as an important recurring character: the sarcastic Hollywood correspondent on the show’s "Weekend Update” segment. The author educates readers on the mechanics of putting together a weekly, 90-minute, live comedy show—e.g., why the sketch that closes the show is dubbed the "5-to-1"—and his anecdotes about the show’s hosts and musical acts are mostly amusing. His kinship with fellow SNL cast member Chris Farley remained strong throughout their shared, blockbuster movie career—though the author devotes only a short chapter to Farley's premature death. In recounting his adolescence, Spade recalls that he wasn't the class clown: "I wasn't the loud attention getter.” Curiously, the author provides scant acknowledgment of his TV work on Just Shoot Me! and Rules of Engagement, and he barely mentions his nominations for several industry awards. He does, however, provide copious, often crude accounts of his disappointments with his early sex life—and his successes later on.
Some vulnerability mixed with crass, frat-boy humor.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237697-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
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 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
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