It’s not deep, but fans of Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, and their wild-and-crazy ilk will find pleasure here.
Film journalist de Semlyen recounts the migration from TV to film of a once-iconic generation of comedians.
The year 1975 saw the debut of Saturday Night Live, with a cast of gifted, sardonic comedians headed by Chevy Chase and John Belushi, who broke all kinds of rules and regulations every time it turned around. Then came the second season, and Chase departed the show for, as he admitted, “money. Lots of money.” The money flowed, and though Chase would star in far more dogs than winners, the comics who followed his path to Hollywood—Belushi, Bill Murray, John Candy, Steve Martin, and many others—overturned the comic image of the Woody Allen–dominated 1970s (“a wimp in specs”) in favor of the smartass who couldn’t be bothered to follow anyone else’s norms. Perhaps the most canonical of all the characters was Belushi, who perfectly filled the role of John “Bluto” Blutarsky in the 1978 film Animal House. Others established their own characters for better or worse and in between: Eddie Murphy was undeniably brilliant, Chase could barely act, Candy and Martin had hidden depths, but all swallowed up whatever was thrown to them as readily as some swallowed up whatever drug was on the table. The book doesn’t have much of a thesis as such, but it’s full of entertaining revelations: Murray was in the running to play Boon in Animal House; Dan Aykroyd was cerebral, anomic, and straitlaced all at once, so much so that a writer described him as “a cross between a state trooper and an android”; everyone loved The Blues Brothers except for Jerry Garcia; and so on. The book is often overwritten (“Steve Martin, a keen student of Picasso, was experiencing his own Blue Period"), but film buffs are likely to forgive the excesses in exchange for its many anecdotal rewards.
It’s not deep, but fans of Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, and their wild-and-crazy ilk will find pleasure here.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984826-64-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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