Izzard’s many fans will enjoy his reflections, less outlandish than expected and more rueful than boastful.
The cross-dressing, multilingual comic speaks on matters from “the basic bloke-in-a-dress look” to international affairs.
Born in the British protectorate of Aden in 1962, Izzard claims he is “a really boring person” who just happens to have swallowed several libraries’ worth of books and lived a fairly interesting, if sometimes difficult, life. His mother died when he was very young, leaving it to a put-upon father and the English school system to raise him; he tends to divide the world into the time “before Mum died” and all the rest of it. One consequence: Izzard is an adamant atheist who holds that if there is anything like a god, then that deity has some explaining to do on matters such as “WWII, Hitler, bowel cancer, and Croc shoes.” Croc shoes may be one thing, but the author’s own garb of plastic trousers, frock or kimono, and black eyeliner was a choice that resulted from an effort to bring the glam aesthetic of David Bowie et al. to the comedy stage. Izzard charts a tough trajectory, from the first glimmers of a career at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 35-odd years ago to a kind of niche superstardom that has put him in concert films, dramatic and comedic movie roles, and other vehicles. Unusually, too, he has taken to performing comedy routines in several European languages, as a statement of universality and fraternity. Here, apart from recounting that path, he takes the opportunity to philosophize—earnestly and much less humorously than one might expect—on many issues of the day, from transgender rights to the struggle to replace pessimism with optimism in a time of hatred and fear. “Despair is the fuel of terrorism,” he writes, “and hope is the fuel of civilization, so we have to put more hope into the world than despair.”
Izzard’s many fans will enjoy his reflections, less outlandish than expected and more rueful than boastful.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-17583-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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