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
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
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
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