Thomas is intent on celebrating the talent and career of Hartman, but he offers little conclusive insight into what was all...
An admiring, often granular report on the life and tragic death of comedian and Saturday Night Live veteran Phil Hartman (1948-1998), a man “adored by millions and slain in his prime.”
Chicago Sun-Times arts/entertainment writer Thomas (The Second City Unscripted: Revolution and Revelation at the World-Famous Comedy Theater, 2009) uses a combination of previously published materials, police reports, letters, and firsthand interviews with family members and famous comedians—including Jay Leno and Julia Sweeney—to put together a chronological narrative of the life and murder of the beloved comedian. Hartman was the star of the NBC sitcom NewsRadio, the voice of several classic roles on The Simpsons and an eight-year veteran of SNL, where he was nicknamed “The Glue” for his versatility and skill at keeping the cast cohesive. At 49, Hartman was murdered in his sleep by his third wife, Brynn, who killed herself several hours later. Thomas begins with exhaustive quantitative details from Hartman’s childhood—such as a nearly full list of his middle school report card grades—but the pace and quality of the book pick up once it moves into Hartman’s adult life. Readers will be entertained by learning the lesser-known facts about the beginning of his career—Hartman did a stint designing album covers for high-profile clients like Crosby, Stills & Nash for his brother’s production company—and the illustrative anecdotes of the Hollywood and New York comedy scenes in the 1980s and ’90s. While Thomas provides some clues about Hartman’s often guarded personality, large questions about his personal life and untimely death go unaddressed.
Thomas is intent on celebrating the talent and career of Hartman, but he offers little conclusive insight into what was all too clearly a troubled marriage. Fans will likely find it an entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-02796-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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