A little Lucille Ball, a little bit Tracy Flick, Kemper proves that good comedy starts with good writing. It's no...
The debut book from the Emmy-nominated actress.
It’s clear within the first chapter of actress Kemper’s memoir that the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star is still playing a character. Her role in the text is that of clever, albeit controlling, comedy writer disguised as the girl next door. Strategically revealing only what she wants the reader to see, the Princeton graduate’s English degree—and her experience as a writer for the Onion—is on full display. The author begins by portraying herself as a precocious child, with a rambling chapter about her obsession with her second-grade student teacher, a Russian woman named Ms. Romanoff. “I hung on every word that came out of her mouth; her voice sounded how my Eggo syrup tasted,” she writes. From there, Kemper picks and chooses choice anecdotes to describe her life, from feckless Ivy League field hockey player to improv workaholic to unsuccessful Saturday Night Live auditioner to cast member on the American version of The Office. What she doesn’t include is the typical celebrity tell-all. For the author, the hero’s struggle is more Anne Shirley than Lisbeth Salander. Imagining what she will tell her children about her obsession with SoulCycle, she writes, “son, there was a time in my life…when I agreed to pay money to take a bicycle-riding class in a studio lit by candles and filled with songs of Coldplay, Pitbull, and E.S. Posthumus.” Everything here is played for laughs, and some setups work better than others. When Kemper sticks the landing, the results are uproarious, as in her encounter with Office creator and star Ricky Gervais, who somehow misunderstood Kemper as saying she played him on the American version of the show.
A little Lucille Ball, a little bit Tracy Flick, Kemper proves that good comedy starts with good writing. It's no Bossypants, but it’s an entertaining celebrity memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6334-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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