Kaufman’s fans will enjoy it, but so will Hecht’s.
An amusing enough trifle for those who believe we really need another book about Andy Kaufman.
The year was 1978, or maybe 1979. Although she didn’t consider herself a journalist, let alone a celebrity profiler, short-story writer Hecht (Do the Windows Open?, 1997) was asked by an editor at Harper’s to do a piece on comedian Kaufman, who was all the rage at the time. Instead of a magazine-sized article, she ended up with a 150-page narrative (published here for the first time) detailing her yearlong attempt to get the man to sit down and do an “official” interview. Along the way, she endured elaborate jokes and pranks orchestrated by Kaufman (abetted by his ever-present sidekick Bob Zmuda), got into absurd arguments with him, ate meals with his family on Long Island, had long talks with his mother, listened to him obsess over sex and food, goaded him to take better care of himself, observed him prevaricate his way through interviews with other magazine writers, and eventually became one of Kaufman’s friends . . . sort of. The official interview—a two-hour Q&A over mediocre vegetarian food at Soho’s famous Spring Street Natural restaurant—didn’t actually happen until Hecht had been chasing Kaufman for a year. But by this time, the journey itself had become the destination, and Hecht had already learned about as much as she was going to from this consistently enigmatic prankster and absurdist. Written mostly in dialogue (peppered with funny and often trenchant asides from Hecht), the book paints a very specific portrait of Kaufman—a performer who treated his audience alternately with generosity or contempt—while leaving intact some essential mysteries about his personality and character. Just when Kaufman seems to have revealed some basic truth about himself—for example, the late admission that all he ever wanted to be in life was a “children’s entertainer”—he says or does something to contradict himself. The question posed by the title is, mercifully, left unanswered by Hecht, who quietly reveals herself as the perfect foil to Kaufman’s antics: centered, skeptical, opinionated, but not without humor or compassion.
Kaufman’s fans will enjoy it, but so will Hecht’s.Pub Date: April 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50457-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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