by Jeff Griggs ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005
Sensitive, discerning, and deeply affectionate without ever slopping over into hagiography.
A wild and fascinating ride with actor Griggs as he chauffeurs improvisational guru Del Close around Chicago during the last two years of Close’s life.
In exchange for free lessons at the ImprovOlympic Training Center, the author was drafted to take artistic director Close on his weekly errands. Griggs was a solid wiseacre, so the Center figured he was up to tangling with an intimidating man who could easily turn actors to onstage jelly with his fiery critiques. But Close was far from a regal figure; he had more weaknesses, quirks, and blemishes than his most talented pupils, who included nearly the entire early Saturday Night Live group. Griggs’s timed and textured prose is anything but improvisational, and each of the short chapters here is a success. They range from grim to hilarious; some are heavy with technique, some simply chronicle a day in the life. Even the chapter that unpromisingly begins, “A new Ikea store had opened, and Del wanted to see it,” turns out to be a doozy. By the time Griggs met Close, the improv legend was plagued by emphysema, and a lifetime of substance abuse had aged him well beyond his 63 years. (The author doesn’t linger over Close’s past, but it gets sufficient airtime.) Yet his mind sparkled, especially when he was expounding on improvisational theater. “Wear your character like a thin veil,” he told Griggs. “Treat your scene partners like artists and poets.” For Close, the best laughter came as a release of energy when “two previously incompatible or dissimilar ideas suddenly form into a new piece of understanding.” Playing the Lord of Misrule in public, he drummed on Griggs like a vibraphone; describing the author as “my little retarded friend” to a bemused Golden Nugget waitress was just the beginning. The errands provided Close with an excuse to travel down Memory Lane, through improvisational theory and into a crackling friendship with his driver.
Sensitive, discerning, and deeply affectionate without ever slopping over into hagiography.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56663-614-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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