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
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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