Essential for Shandling fans and a good choice for readers interested in stand-up and comedy writing.
Garry Shandling's family, friends, and colleagues paint an affectionate portrait of a driven, introspective artist who had a hard time getting out of his own head.
Apatow (Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy, 2015, etc.) never thought his comedy mentor and buddy was the kind of guy who liked to hold on to things. After all, the self-deprecating comedian was a practicing Buddhist. Nevertheless, following Shandling’s 2016 death at age 66, Apatow discovered that his teacher and former boss had actually kept everything—including a revelatory trove of journal entries and personal notes stretching back decades. The discovery led to the HBO documentary The Zen Diaries of Gary Shandling. Here, Apatow uses those earnest entries in conjunction with additional interviews to further explore the legendary comedian’s often besieged psyche. Despite stellar successes that included two seminal TV series (It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Larry Sanders Show), Shandling could never shake the death of his older brother, Barry, who died from cystic fibrosis when Garry was just 10. Under that dark shroud, Shandling additionally obsessed about award show monologues, TV scripts, and his unrelenting ego. “He had rage,” notes Sarah Silverman. “He could really hold on to stuff and be troubled by things that to other people might seem small, but he was always working on that, always trying to process it and understand it." Throughout his professional life, that diligence both helped and hampered Shandling, whether he was writing TV scripts for Sanford & Son or breaking into the movies with the ill-fated What Planet Are You From? In the latter case, Shandling’s mix of insecurity and perfectionism proved too much for director Mike Nichols, and the film flopped. Professional highs and lows aside, Shandling is remembered as a man who spent his entire life seeking and generously giving of himself—even if that self was the cause of most of his woes.
Essential for Shandling fans and a good choice for readers interested in stand-up and comedy writing.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-51084-0
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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