The ubiquitous TV emcee (his occupation: —personality—) presents a prototypical show-biz autobiography with the significant help of a seasoned amanuensis (All My Best Friends, with George Burns, 1989, etc.). McMahon (Here’s Ed, 1976; Ed McMahon’s Superselling, 1989; etc.) invented a character—a hearty, bibulous Irish salesman and straight man named Ed McMahon—and played it to the fullest. He has appeared on the small screen for an amazing half century. (Somehow, it seems longer.) Before he was a second banana, he performed as bingo caller, door-to-door vendor of pots and pans, and boardwalk pitchman. The carney talent for hokum that he perfected then has endured. The justifiable pride he earned as a marine fighter pilot has also lasted. He has always worked at his profession and now clearly enjoys his perhaps exaggerated fame. (Surely, not everyone in the world knows Ed McMahon?) The core of the book, naturally, is the 30-year gig as a very obsequious Falstaff to Carson’s Prince Hal. He says that much of their repartee was unrehearsed. (Why, then, did it often seem like a slick routine?) Old gags and adventures with Carnac and Aunt Blabby are recalled. There developed a wary fellowship as the two performers went through myriad marriages. McMahon describes his three uxorious escapades and the resultant family relationships. He talks of show-biz folk with an encomium for each (there’s “the great” Dick Clark, “the brilliant” Freddy de Cordova, “the incredible” Jonathan Winters, and “the legendary” Bob and Ray), and there’s a persistent lunge for a one-liner at the end of each paragraph. It’s all in character, like the fabled imbibing. Now, at 75, Ed has cut down to one glass of red wine a day, though he may “cheat a little: it’s still one glass, but I fill it twice.” A gregarious hustler’s autobiography, pure theatrics for those who take a rousing call of “Hi-yoooo!” for wit. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52370-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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
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