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WHEN VARIETY WAS KING

MEMOIR OF A TV PIONEER: FEATURING JACKIE GLEASON, SONNY AND CHER, HEE HAW, AND MORE

A simple but often fascinating look at TV history through the eyes of one of the medium’s seminal figures.

Longtime comedy writer/producer Peppiatt (1927–2012) looks back on his life as one of the busiest men in TV history.

Born in Canada just as the Roaring ’20s abruptly segued into the Great Depression, the author graduated from the University of Toronto and, after graduation, much to his father’s chagrin, took a menial job at a local radio station. From there, he gradually worked his way into writing scripts for radio. By 1952, he was a TV writer for the fledgling Canadian Broadcasting Company. By 1958, he and his writing partner John Aylesworth were in New York writing for popular singer/show host Steve Lawrence. During the next 20 or so years, Peppiatt and Aylesworth crisscrossed the country from New York to LA, writing and producing one variety show after another, including Sonny and Cher, the Steve Allen ShowHullabaloo and even the countrified TV smash Hee Haw. Peppiatt was the classic raised-in-the-Depression workaholic, but he eventually had to choose between marriage to his work or to his wife—of course, it didn't help that his first wife was a jealous harpy who resented his success even as she embraced its fruits. Banal domestic turmoil aside, though, there are plenty of memorable moments here, especially when Peppiatt finds himself having to deal with drama queens like Julie Andrews, Judy Garland, Cher, Doris Day and others. Peppiatt’s prose is conversational and classy, although, disappointingly, there are few clear examples of his professional comedic style.

A simple but often fascinating look at TV history through the eyes of one of the medium’s seminal figures.

Pub Date: April 1, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-77041-157-9

Page Count: 300

Publisher: ECW Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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