by Phil Doran ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005
Bets are that Doran spends more time in Italy now than he does in California.
He gave up television for a home in Tuscany, and he grouses about it?
Yes, writer-producer Doran’s comic transplanting from Los Angeles to rural Italy initially wrenched at the moorings of his wayward self-esteem, though it eventually cut him a new and better course. After 25 years, the successful sitcom veteran found himself struggling against the next wave, the young guys who were washing the old ones into the sea of unemployment. Fortunately, his wife was arranging a new life for them in Italy, where she had purchased a 250-year-old stone farmhouse atop a hill of olive trees outside the town of Combione. Will this be another self-congratulatory memoir of a well-off couple moving into the silvery haze of a midlife rejuvenation along the Mediterranean, throwing brickbats and dollars at the foibles of the locals? Thankfully, no. Doran is a deeply neurotic character, a man subject to anxiety attacks and facial tics when things go against him. It took him months to know a good thing when it bit his ankle. The stress of moving house, the troublesome brood living next door, the zealous bureaucratic confrontations, and the standard delays in getting anything done all drove him into a state of collapse. But he also came to realize that he had fed at the trough of Hollywood long enough and lived in his own skull too many years. His narrow band of emotions would be better served by a scream or a loud laugh, Doran concluded. He vented his “inner Italian,” the part that craved to savor life at full throttle, to e-mail his agent to stick it, to get married again (to the same woman). Sure, he sometimes broke into a sweat but he also slipped into a new life without the advantage of pharmo-chemicals.
Bets are that Doran spends more time in Italy now than he does in California.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-592-40118-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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