Nice guy; nice book.
An amiable collection of reminiscences by the Indian actor about girls, school, jobs, family, and acting.
Though Nayyar is best (or even only) known for his comic role in the television series The Big Bang Theory, this book debut isn’t a collection of extended bits and sketches, like so many by comedians are. The author doesn’t try too hard to be funny, which is part of his charm. Nayyar admits from the outset that he hasn’t lived long enough or accomplished enough to justify a memoir: “I’m not a president, or an astronaut, or a Kardashian. This is a collection of stories from my life.” Its target readership is fans of the series and his geeky character featured on it, but its conversational tone will also appeal to anyone who wants to read about a regular guy, Indian style. Even there, his life was saturated with American media, as reflected in the opening essay, “Everything I Know About Kissing I Learned from Winnie Cooper,” which tells how watching The Wonder Years and becoming infatuated with its young actress while growing up prepared him for his own first kiss and how life came full circle when his acting career gave him the chance to kiss the real actress. When he pursued his education in America, he initially majored in business and planned a marketing career, though he dabbled in acting in order to meet girls. As the author tells it, his romantic life existed mainly in his head, though his first real girlfriend was an acting student who was the love of the campus, and his marriage to a former Miss India ends the book. Yes, Nayyar’s been a lucky guy whose first real audition resulted in the big break that brought him to TV and resulted in this book, but his explanation reflects his experience: “Every person has a different journey. But no one has an easy one.”
Nice guy; nice book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6182-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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