Life of John Cleese, by a London feature writer, gossip columnist, and show-business reporter. While not a winner, Margolis's account will greatly interest comedy fans. Is Cleese ``the funniest man in the world,'' as Margolis claims? A strong case—drawn from Cleese's 12 scripts and performances for the British supersitcom Fawlty Towers and his script for and performance in A Fish Called Wanda (Britain's most successful film comedy ever), to say nothing of his handcrafted Schweppervescence ads—can be made for this idea. The sad part is that Margolis's opening hundred pages, before Cleese arrives at his leadership of the Monty Python team of writer-actors, are so footslogging—despite the reader's inherent curiosity about Cleese's childhood quirks and the foibles of his young manhood. Cleese was born in dreary Weston-super-Mare, at age 13 reached his adult height of six feet four, and has gone through life as an eccentrically serious man. He set out to be a lawyer but at Cambridge fell into stage comedies that eventually took him on the road with his university troupe, members of which became the nucleus of the Monty Python team. The team's groundbreaking inventiveness rose above satire into a madcap frolicking that broke nearly all barriers to what could be said or shown on British TV. Cleese, however, was not fulfilled by Monty Python, most of whose skits he thinks are dreadfully witless, and set out to craft the absolutely most satisfying TV comedy possible. With his separated wife, Connie Booth, he wrote Fawlty Towers—or rewrote, since most episodes went through ten drafts until every rift was packed with comic ore. Meanwhile, Cleese started up Video Arts, an amazingly successful company that produced seriocomic how-to-run-a-business films. The story of a generally stone-faced, slow-reading polymath whose comic genius takes fans, ballistically, through the roof. (Eight pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-08162-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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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