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 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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