A true vaudevillian, Short is always on as he delivers funny anecdotes from a diffuse and storied career.
Actor, singer and spasmodic funnyman Short delivers a memoir with cameos by his famous characters.
The youngest of five children, Short (b. 1950) credits his quick wit to a Darwinian struggle for the last word at family dinners, as the children battled the acerbic sarcasm of their father. A precocious child, the author would record his own bedroom variety show, but he’d never considered show business a legitimate future until his senior year of college, when he gave himself a year to pursue his dream. Luckily, Short got his first big break as part of the Toronto production of the off-Broadway smash Godspell. Short even boasts the scene had a “Paris-in-the-’20s thing going on” due to all the would-be stars that were around, including John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Dan Ackroyd and Paul Shaffer. Most of them were associated with Godspell or with the comedy group Second City, which Short would later join, eventually landing on Saturday Night Live and then beginning a film career. For all his success, Short notes with genuine pathos that it wasn’t without sacrifice; he suffered the losses of his oldest brother, mother and father all by the time he was 20. He also recounts the loss of his beloved wife to cancer. Ever positive, he reflects that these tragedies gave him a fearlessness about life. Though he was tenacious, Short jokes that his tombstone will bear only the word “Almost,” as her never quite ascended to official movie stardom. Matching the successes of films like Three Amigos and Father of the Bride were misses like Clifford and a daytime talk show that failed to be the career second coming Short imagined. He experiences all this doubt despite winning an Emmy and a Tony, which again only proves his drive and versatility, rightfully earning him the nickname “Mr. Entertainment.”
A true vaudevillian, Short is always on as he delivers funny anecdotes from a diffuse and storied career.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062309525
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 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
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