Nostalgic and affectionate, with plenty of dish; just the thing for fans of the show.
Lifestyle journalist Miller (Big Girl: How I Gave up Dieting and Got a Life, 2016) goes behind the scenes of Friends.
In the same rough semantic domain as Seinfeld and the now-forgotten HBO comedy Dream On, Friends had all the virtues and some of the vices of its era—which, the author reminds us, is a quarter-century ago now. It was resolutely white, determinedly nondiverse, and marked by all the gay jokes and sexist tropes of the era, though over its long run it began to change. Miller notes, for example, that Friends featured the first lesbian wedding, though it shied away from anything particularly overt and certainly anything political. Rather blandly, the author explains, “the general consensus was that TV in that time was not a sophisticated or inclusive landscape, and in some ways Friends was better than its peers”—i.e., something was better than nothing. One reason for the success of Friends, Miller capably shows, was the absolute rightness of its cast, some of whom—David Schwimmer in particular—were reluctant, others shrewd in asserting the wisdom of allowing them to make notes and pull together as a true ensemble. (On that note, Courtney Cox emerges as a real hero.) Said one Rolling Stone writer who covered the show, “I’ve never seen a cast…stick together to the degree they did.” Given the post-Friends fortunes of those cast members, it would seem that lightning had been captured in a bottle. Miller is good at the small moments, less so about threading the show into the general culture. And for those clamoring for a reunion, as every other show of the time seems to be rebooting? Let cast member Lisa Kudrow tell it: “That was about people in their twenties, thirties. The show isn’t about people in their forties, fifties. And if we have the same problems, that’s just sad."
Nostalgic and affectionate, with plenty of dish; just the thing for fans of the show.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-335-92828-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
“Ideology is fairy tales for adults.” Thus writes economist and conservative maven Sowell in a best-of volume shot through with…ideology.
Though he resists easy categorization, the author has been associated with hard-libertarian organizations and think tanks such as the Hoover Institution for most of his long working life. Here he picks from his numerous writings, which have the consistency of an ideologue—e.g., affirmative action is bad, period. It’s up to parents, not society or the schools, to be sure that children are educated. Ethnic studies and the “mania for ‘diversity’ ” produce delusions. Colleges teach impressionable Americans to “despise American society.” Minimum-wage laws are a drag on the economy. And so on. Sowell is generally fair-minded, reasonable and logical, but his readers will likely already be converts to his cause, for which reason he does not need to examine all the angles of a problem. (If it is true that most gun violence is committed in households where domestic abuse has taken place, then why not take away the abusers’ guns as part of the legal sentencing?) Often his arguments are very smart, as when he examines the career of Booker T. Washington, who was adept in using white people’s money to advance his causes while harboring no illusions that his benefactors were saints. Sometimes, though, Sowell’s sentiments emerge as pabulum, as when he writes, in would-be apothegms: “Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can’t stop with just one”; “I can understand why some people like to drive slowly. What I cannot understand is why they get in the fast lane to do it.” The answer to the second question, following Sowell, might go thus: because they’re liberals and the state tells them to do it, just to get in the way of hard-working real Americans. A solid, representative collection by a writer and thinker whom one either agrees with or not—and there’s not much middle ground on which to stand.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-465-02250-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
SEEN & HEARD
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