A funny, tender, and vividly rendered memoir of the author’s boyhood in 1960s Dublin. Irish theater director Sheridan spent his youth in a house teeming with siblings and miscellaneous lodgers. Like Angela’s Ashes, this is a memoir about a family’s muddling through, of a boy’s learning to laugh in order to keep from crying. Though less squalid than McCourt’s Limerick, Sheridan’s Dublin is a quirky, colorful place. His dad is a hilariously indefatigable Mr. Fix-it, vanquished repeatedly by a malfunctioning TV set and a diabolically possessed washing machine. Never have the frustrations of home repair been so delightfully chronicled. Here’s Sheridan on the family’s maniacal washing machine: “Every time [ma] turned it on, it leaked. When one source was plugged, it found somewhere else to leak from. . .We were living permanently in Wellington boots. If things continued, a raft was next.” As in most Irish memoirs about childhood, Sheridan’s school is a repressive prison run by bullying, sometimes pedophile priests. Sheridan and his friend Andy form a bad garage band, listen to Beatles records, and smoke pot. Andy’s older sister becomes the object of Sheridan’s painful first love, the target of his hopelessly ineffective romantic advances. Sheridan sneaks into a Swedish movie about birth and the female anatomy. Mouth agape, he emerges from the theater a wiser man: “Now life was awash with new concepts . . . with uterus, cervix, and placenta, words that sounded like planets from the outer reaches of the solar system.” Tragedy arrives when the author’s younger brother dies after brain surgery. Looking at his devastated parents, Sheridan has an epiphany: “Maybe that’s all there was—procreation and death. You live on in your children, but you die.” At 17, Sheridan finds the love of his life: the theater. Acting becomes his way of understanding himself and the world around him. A thoroughly enjoyable, comic journey back in time; Sheridan has brilliantly re-created his delightful, poignant boyhood. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88514-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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