A small-town-kid-in-a-big-city memoir that mostly shines with borrowed star power but glows every now and then with its own...
An Emmy Award–winning CNN producer shares an occasionally humorous peek into his star-studded, behind-the-scenes life in broadcasting.
“If a bird can adapt and succeed in the big, complicated city,” writes Anderson Cooper 360 producer Gray after observing a pigeon cross a busy street, “I can, too.” The author chronicles his career from its early beginnings in small-town New Hampshire, where, armed with a camcorder, he recruited his 8-year-old sister and great-grandmother for his own nightly news show. Since then, Gray has booked the likes of powerhouse notables Condoleezza Rice, John Kerry and Mitt Romney, and he's witnessed the “glorious chaos” of the political arena. He's also become best buds with Kathy Griffin and Soleil Moon Frye. As with all good works of celebrity gossip, Kim Kardashian makes a brief appearance in these essays. Although the relentless scatological humor and cheap shots at celebrities who've made it on his hit list are no doubt intended to be funny, the comedy is often lost in Gray's cynical, heavy-handed snark. Gray is at his best when he steers clear of secondhand glamour, instead focusing on his family or shining a spotlight on the shortcomings of the contemporary news-media industry. The author writes eloquently and insightfully of the rapidly changing cable-news scene and its “real-time insanity,” while simple stories of his dog, grandparents and coming out to his family are honest and tender. Play-by-play accounts of buying donuts with Griffin in the middle of the night, however, have more in common with the kind of Twitter drivel Gray lambastes.
A small-town-kid-in-a-big-city memoir that mostly shines with borrowed star power but glows every now and then with its own candor and heart.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4134-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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