Jewish comic scorned—venting, revealing, regretting and maybe even meaning it.
Tell-all memoirs of the tempestuous, sometimes tortured relationship between two personalities cast by fate and a whole bunch of money as comic and straight man.
Give Lewis credit for selective candor, but what he reveals about himself in the process of telling his side of the Martin (1917–95) and Lewis story is often more trenchant than his conflicted report of what went wrong, and occasionally right, with the partnership that lasted a lime-lit ten years. While Lewis opens and closes with heartfelt admiration and—yes, at one point they do affirm it to one another—love for what he calls the best straight man ever to tread a stage, in this book’s long interim, Martin’s character suffers the death of a thousand condescensions. Even as Lewis starts by recalling their last, choked-up performance together in 1956 at New York’s Copacabana, for example, he muses that while “truth was my greatest ally . . . Dean could lie if it would spare someone’s feelings. I had difficulty with that.” And from the beginning, it’s the older Martin, in a “big brother” role Lewis conjures for himself, introducing the kid to hard liquor (although Martin’s later boozy TV persona was a well-calculated act), mobsters, marijuana and, most of all, “other” women. Jerry eventually rationalizes philandering as just part of showbiz; he confesses they made the scene together with peaches-’n’-cream MGM actresses June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven (both married to Hollywood actors at the time) in what is described as an extended Manhattan shack-up. It’s Martin’s consistent insensitivities and ingratitude, often tinged with ridicule, that start to grind, however. He plays golf and reads comic books while Lewis deals with business, etc., and at one point is a no-show at a charity commitment. Lewis blows up (he claims he initiated the split), and after a nasty onstage fall—solo—winds up gobbling Percodans.
Jewish comic scorned—venting, revealing, regretting and maybe even meaning it.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-7679-2086-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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