A terrific account of a truly unique sensation, best accompanied by pulling up corresponding sketches on YouTube.
The inside story of one of the most groundbreaking and influential comedy troupes from the golden age of MTV.
Musician and writer Myers (A Wizard, a True Star: Todd Rundgren in the Studio, 2010, etc.) happens to be the brother of actor and comedian Mike Myers, giving him a unique perspective to tell the inside story of the Canadian comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall. The author had an extraordinary level of access, and the book features contributions from not only the founding members—Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, and Scott Thompson—but also from industry legends and others, including the normally elusive Lorne Michaels, who produced their show, as well as Mike Myers, Judd Apatow, Samantha Bee, Bob Odenkirk, and Seth Myers, who provides the foreword. The author tracks the Kids’ paths from childhood to the formation of the comedy troupe in 1984, through their “comedy boot camp” in New York courtesy of Michaels, to the hilarious, often audacious show that just managed to stay on the air from 1989 to 1995. They’re a fascinating group, from McCulloch’s social commentary to McKinney’s character-driven “jams” to seemingly secret weapon Foley, who would go on to further fame in NewsRadio. It’s also interesting to watch an obviously eager McDonald struggle with his physical image while openly gay Thompson tussles with his identity even as the Kids were breaking taboos with drag characters and trolling the straight world with skits like “Dr. Seuss Bible” and monologues like Thompson’s “The Night the Drag Queens Took Over the World.” Myers’ prose is reliably steady, and his subjects are surprisingly unfiltered in their remembrances. It’s a fun story that doesn’t end in a bad breakup, as Myers notes: “As of this writing, the Rolling Stones are still together, and so too are the Kids in the Hall.”
A terrific account of a truly unique sensation, best accompanied by pulling up corresponding sketches on YouTube.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4870-0183-4
Page Count: 344
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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