Entertainment-industry denizens are well aware of Close’s impact on the showbiz landscape, but this loving, honest portrait...
The definitive biography of an improvisational comedy guru.
If not for an unassuming, Kansas-born stand-up-comic-turned-actor-turned-director named Del Close (1934–1999), there would probably be no Saturday Night Live, SCTV or Animal House—in fact, modern film, television and stage comedy as a whole would be radically different. Soon after making his name with the 1959 album How to Speak Hip, Close moved to Chicago and became a key behind-the-scenes player at the legendary improvisational theater Second City. From ’65 to ’69 he lived in California, where he worked with San Francisco’s The Committee improv troupe, toured with the Merry Pranksters and made light designs for the Grateful Dead. Returning to Chicago in 1970, he co-founded ImprovOlympic, a legendary comedy breeding ground. John Belushi, Bill Murray, Chris Farley, Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert are among the dozens of comic actors who have since cited Close as a key influence. Sardonic to the end, his deathbed words were, “Thank God. I’m tired of being the funniest person in the room.” Johnson (Life Before and After Monty Python: The Solo Flights of the Flying Circus, 1993, etc.) presents an evenhanded look at his subject, who was a longtime friend. He heaps praise when it’s justified (most of the time), but doesn’t hold back when discussing Close’s drug addiction. Fluent in the language of improvisation, the author manages to translate many of Close’s concepts to the page, most notably the ins and outs of a long-form exercise called the Harold: Aspiring comedic actors are advised to study up. As an insider, Johnson was able to score revealing interviews with more than 80 Close acolytes, including Mike Nichols, Jim Belushi and Jon Favreau.
Entertainment-industry denizens are well aware of Close’s impact on the showbiz landscape, but this loving, honest portrait will help the rest of the world get hip to the guy who made comedy hip.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55652-712-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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