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
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
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