Rants aside, a unique perspective on the perils of modern comedy from a survivor with a long memory.
A fast, funny and informative stand-up routine/memoir from one of the major comic stars of the 1970s.
Walker—who made his name as J.J. Evans on the sitcom Good Times—recounts his life in the ghetto, on TV and on the road. He gives a good inside look at the TV show, where he was cast as the teenage J.J., surprising producers and angering the cast by becoming the breakout star. At the peak of his fame, he would also play a supporting role in the careers of both David Letterman and Jay Leno, two of the many struggling unknown comics who wrote jokes for him. He also had a front-row seat to the decades-long friendship-turned-bitter rivalry that would lead to the late-show wars of the early 1990s; long after the dust has settled, he remains strongly Team Letterman, holding Leno in contempt. As for the rest of the competition, he admired Richard Pryor, had limited patience for Andy Kaufman and thinks Cosby is king. (He also admits he isn’t always the best judge, having once advised Steve Martin to find another career.) Walker also acknowledges certain limits that come with his choice of career: “The problem is that white comics don't have to be white, but black comics have to be black.” Other limits are self-imposed; although uninhibited in his lifestyle, this self-proclaimed “Johnny Mathis of Black Comedians” has long adhered to his friend David Brenner’s advice that you can’t be successful if you can’t work clean. He is similarly conservative in his politics. Walker, once the comic relief for Black Panther rallies, takes a little too much delight in being a “black sheep among black people.”
Rants aside, a unique perspective on the perils of modern comedy from a survivor with a long memory.Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82083-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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