Essential for Python fans, who for once will not know all the punch lines.
Well-liked comic and world traveler Palin (Himalaya, 2005, etc.) turns in affable notes toward a memoir of a whirlwind decade.
Equating keeping a diary to giving up smoking—painful and no fun at first, then patently the right thing to do—Palin chronicles a time when he and his fellow Monty Pythons were setting to work making comedy history. The beginnings of the BBC series that no one quite knew what to call (The Toad Elevating Moment? Owl-Stretching Time?) were, he allows, “very bizarre,” with sketches devoted to “the death of Genghis Khan, and two men carrying a donkey past a Butlins redcoat, who later gets hit on the head with a raw chicken by a man from the previous sketch, who borrowed the chicken from a man in a suit of armor.” There are epoch-making moments: we may never know whether the pet shop of November 12, 1970, was the epicenter of the dead parrot sketch, but we now can be sure that March 29, 1971, a Monday, marks the birth of the “Grimsby Fish-Slapping dance—which ends up with my being knocked about eight feet into the cold, green, insalubrious waters of the Thames.” Python completists will be fascinated to learn that relations between the troupe members were occasionally strained, as were personal budgets; Palin reveals that they often took on ad-writing jobs for Guinness beer and such to have a few extra pence to spend. Less madcap than some of his fellows, comfortably married with children and on the quiet and bookish side to begin with, Palin still gets into misadventures and scrapes, among them with the censors who objected to the line “We make castanets of your testicles” from Holy Grail. Nonetheless, he is mostly gentle toward his foils, some of whom, such as an Indian-food-scarfing, Lumberjack-Song-quoting George Harrison, emerge as even more lovely than before.
Essential for Python fans, who for once will not know all the punch lines.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36935-4
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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