A zippy reminder of what we've all thankfully escaped.
The creator of the short-lived but highly praised TV series Freaks and Geeks takes us on an enjoyable tour through some of the more vivid scenes of tortured 1970s adolescence in the American suburban landscape.
Gifted with a remarkable ability to remember the specific and singular torments of youth, Feig presents a collection of essays about a smorgasbord of incidents that should be familiar to anyone who has experienced life before age 18. There is the botched first kiss, the alternating boredom and misery of a single little-league season, the inevitability of a derogatory nickname based on his last name (Feig got off easy with “Fignewton” in elementary school, but by middle school had been dubbed “Fag”). The author plays it all for laughs, whether he's detailing the challenges of getting his matter-of-fact parents to whip up an elf costume for the elementary-school play (all costume elements were gleaned from his father's Army-Navy surplus store), or taking a frighteningly “fast” girl to the Christmas dance (she drinks, vomits, and then expects a kiss). Feig spares himself no humiliation, relaying with great gusto his discovery of masturbation during rope-climbing day in gym class, and his brief fascination with cross-dressing, which ended abruptly when his mother was in a car accident and, with no time to change, he had to appear at the scene in full drag. Though not much of a stylist—“I've never been much for sports” is a typical opening line—the author has a dead-on sense of timing and detail. Delivering any sort of message is secondary to getting a laugh, but Feig does convey the absolute bewilderment of being a kid who cannot automatically accept the countless social conventions that seem unquestioned by his peers.
A zippy reminder of what we've all thankfully escaped.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-80943-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
