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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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