A discerning, sharply drawn portrait of the life and work of one of the founding fathers of contemporary comedy. Given the neutering scalpel of commerce (advertisers tend to shy from anything approaching scabrous satire or pointed iconoclasm) and given his belief that “comedy is a baby seal hunt,” it’s amazing that Donoghue enjoyed as much success as he did. For a brief moment in the early 1970s, with his pivotal work on the newly founded National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, O’Donoghue was American humor. More sophisticated and polished than the prototypical “angry” comedian, he took on any and all sacred cows, with a fervor and rage drawn from the edge of the abyss. But laughter was only a means to an end. As he once noted: “Humor is not the cake. Humor is the icing on the cake. . . . Thought, communication, this is the cake.” Childhood is the crucible of comedians, and O’Donoghue’s, as recounted here, was lonely and narrowed by frequent sickness. He was determined to become a playwright, and while he had little success, drama’s concision and interplay of ideas served him well when he turned to comedy. For a satirist, he was remarkably thin-skinned. His vicious temper and tendency to feud ensured he was never widely liked, though his work was always admired, especially by his comedic peers. When television came calling, he was happy to leave the National Lampoon; however, despite some signal, early success with Saturday Night Live, its inevitable shift to blandness and safe humor (with increasing numbers of his pieces censored or axed) eventually led to a rancorous parting of the ways. And that was really the end of his creative life. In the last ten years, before his sudden, early death, O’Donoghue toiled in Hollywood development hell, managing to get just one of his scripts, Scrooged, produced. Freelance writer Perrin has done a signal job of reclaiming the edgy spirit and importance of O’Donoghue’s work. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97330-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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