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MAKE 'EM LAUGH

SHORT-TERM MEMORIES OF LONGTIME FRIENDS

Names drop like snowflakes, glistening in the sunny terrain of this exuberant memoir.

A frothy collection of stories and gossip from the comedic actress.

Reynolds (Unsinkable, 2013, etc.), aided by co-author Hannaway, former late-night programming director for CBS, looks back happily at her 65-year career on stage, screen, and TV. Calling herself “a vaudevillian, a baggy-pants comedian,” she confesses she’ll “do anything to get a laugh”: pretending to ravish TV host Jack Paar under his desk (“Debbie Goes Wild!” exclaimed the next day’s headlines); tackling Regis Philbin (“a cute young thing…small and wiry and fit”); dancing so energetically with Johnny Carson that he ended up sweating and winded. Although she regrets not having had “more sex” and confesses to a “lack of passion” that “probably cost me dearly in my marriages,” Reynolds delights in revealing some of her aristocratic admirers. Newly divorced from Eddie Fisher, she caught the eye of 28-year-old King Baudouin of Belgium, whom she spirited away to a day at the beach; in London for a celebration of Bob Hope’s 82nd birthday, Prince Philip progressed from holding her hand to caressing her backside; and the shah of Iran, whose wife invited her to perform at their palace, was so enchanted that he wouldn’t let her stop singing. At a post-performance dinner, “I kept looking around, hoping for some rich, single prince to take an interest in me,” Reynolds writes. Instead, she received a gift from the shah of a handmade Persian rug. The bubbly Reynolds has a kind word for almost everyone: Howard Hughes, “the most polite, southern Texas kind of gentleman”; Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Reynolds had “a very unusual friendship”; her personal assistant, who had been one of her most ardent fans; and her many hairdressers. Only the “obnoxious” Milton Berle and the “pain in the ass” Shelley Winters merit her scorn. The rest is pure frosting.

Names drop like snowflakes, glistening in the sunny terrain of this exuberant memoir.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-06-241663-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


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    winner


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  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Winner


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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