A funny, honest, and compassionate account of growing up with a master of comedy.
George Carlin’s daughter offers an intimate look at her life growing up with a comedy legend.
Kelly Carlin was the only child of a father who started doing stand-up “on the stoops on his block, imitating the priests, cops and shopkeepers of [his New York City] neighborhood.” By the time she was 3, the family moved from Manhattan to Hollywood, where her father began to taste the success he had always dreamed of. But notoriety had its price. Carlin and her mother, Brenda, were often alone while George was out on the road performing. Brenda began to turn to alcohol and drugs to assuage the pain of separation and—in accordance with her husband’s wishes—of being unable to seek a life and career outside the home. Tired of being a “performing monkey” who entertained without touching on what he considered to be the truths of his times, George outgrew his early image as a clean-cut performer. By the early 1970s, he was routinely dropping acid, ingesting “ridiculous amounts of cocaine” and openly challenging the establishment with fiercely provocative comedy. Meanwhile, the Carlin household descended into chaos. Brought up without a clear sense of herself, the directionless author became involved in abusive relationships, a pattern she broke only after deciding to return to college in her late 20s. From that moment on, her “poor Hollywood rich kid” story evolves into an even more compelling one about a woman who struggles to come to terms with the parents she loved but whose choices and permissiveness caused her to stumble as a young adult. Without casting blame on either parent, Carlin emerges from the troubled shadow of her family. She becomes a self-aware woman able to appreciate the contributions both made to her life and—in the case of her father, the comedic “god you could smoke a joint with”—to the world.
A funny, honest, and compassionate account of growing up with a master of comedy.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05825-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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