Staying married and eliciting laughter: both are more of a challenge than the title might suggest. But if this requires more...
More than a biography, this is an account of the whole gamut of emotions and experiences that populate and define a life.
Readers better not expect a laugh fest starring the high-decibel, orange-haired father of George Costanza on Seinfeld. Stiller did play that role, years after the fade-out of the comedy act called Stiller and Meara, which brought fame to him and his wife Anne. But this book is not about the Seinfeld escapade. Likewise, anyone wanting to read about the dad of busy young actor Ben Stiller will find only a sentence or two about Ben's childhood and career. For the most part, Stiller's memoir inhabits another era entirely, where the author's idols were people like Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante, and where trips to vaudeville shows with his father gave him his love of theater. We cover a lot of territory: the immigrant experience of Stiller's mother and grandparents, life in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side during the first half of the 20th century, the Depression, growing up in a dysfunctional family (before that term was invented), and army life for an eager teenage recruit toward the end of WWII. We are also introduced to a more innocent time in show business, when the guy sweeping outside the theater could be the producer, and when you might get a part if you promised to also paint scenery. There's a lot of name-dropping here, but a little past the halfway mark, Stiller seems to settle down to a less anecdotal, more sincere presentation. In that final third of the book, Stiller describes his return to serious acting and strives to understand his marriage. In both areas, he struggles to find the real emotions he fears he has buried too deep.
Staying married and eliciting laughter: both are more of a challenge than the title might suggest. But if this requires more attention from the reader than expected, it also yields a more satisfying read.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86903-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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
SEEN & HEARD
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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