Unauthorized life and career of Richard Pryor set against the careers of many African-American comedians and actors; by the father-son Williams team of novelist John A. (Jacob's Ladder, 1987, etc.) and son Dennis A., a former Newsweek journalist. The Williamses clearly did not have Pryor himself as a source and often fall back on ``seems to'' and ``must have'' when they lack hard facts. Their book, however, is chockablock with data about the history of black comedians and Pryor's rise and fall in the hierarchy. The title comes from Pryor's famous free-basing coke blast in which he set himself on fire and ran down the street, his cooked body smoking, until some alert cops stopped him: ``Stop, Richard. We gotta get you to a hospital.'' ``If I stop I'll die.'' Pryor was a knockout comedian as a Peoria, Ill., school kid, but when he broke into show business he tamed his humor and set about imitating soft-spoken Bill Cosby, whose only rival then was Dick Gregory. In a famous episode in Las Vegas, Pryor walked off the stage in midperformance and drove to Los Angeles: He'd realized to his chagrin that he was enjoying himself when playing to a sort of ``Mother's Day'' crowd. Over the next three years, the true Pryor emerged, with his wildly brash sexual humor and stories about his family and his own self-destructive behavior and drug-taking. Although he's made 40-some movies, often as writer/actor, Pryor is stifled by the screen but blooms on stage. In fact, he often plays characters on film that he once lampooned blisteringly on stage. The authors mean this to be a sympathetic critical biography, but Pryor does not come off all that well, despite a final paean by Dennis A. that directs us back to the comedian's great concert tapes. Still, in all, lively, serious scholarship. (Photographs— not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1991
ISBN: 1-56025-008-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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