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 Show, Hullabaloo 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
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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