Engaging because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
A fitfully amusing memoir that seems to be based on the (seemingly correct) premise that any comedian can land a book deal.
Mainly known as the host of The Soup, McHale is no Tina Fey. However, any prolonged exposure on TV seems to require that the personality put his name on a memoir as a means of “ ‘extending his brand’ through the written word.” Thus it is with The Soup host and co-star of the sitcom Community. “I needed a new revenue stream,” writes the author. “Sure I had conquered television—both real and cable. I had mildly defeated the world of cinema—both theatrical and straight-to-video. And I had bent the world of comedy over my knee and made it called me ‘the Harbormaster’….I was good at talking, that much was certain. But how could I turn the words I usually talked into a permanent thing that people could purchase at a wildly inflated price?” Even those who don’t care much about McHale or feel that they know enough about him will be entertained by his tales of prickly Chevy Chase, his annotated account of the various actresses he has kissed (and fondled), his tempest-in-a-teapot feuds after delivering comic jobs at Robert DeNiro and Mickey Rourke, and his memories of Robin Williams and “Chubby Matt Damon.” When hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, McHale discovered that “the experience of meeting the president was like a ride at Disneyland. You wait in a long line, the most exciting part lasts a few seconds, and then you’re spit out into an empty hallway, breathless and dazed. Later, someone shows you a photo to prove that it happened.” The book’s second section is funny self-help, designed to show readers how to attain, sustain, and survive the author’s level of celebrity. It extends the amusement park simile: “the life of a celebrity is like a roller coaster—plenty of ups and downs, and with a fair share of vomit.”
Engaging because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-57537-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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