Certainly for fans of The Office, but the amiable actor also offers thoughtful glimpses into the realities of the TV and...
The actor best known for playing Dwight Schrute on The Office and founder of the inspirational website and media company SoulPancake shares tales of his awkward youth and later adventures as a struggling actor in New York and Los Angeles—a journey sustained by his lasting commitment to the Baha’i faith.
Beginning with a foreword written in the voice of Schrute, Wilson (co-author: SoulPancake: Chew on Life's Big Questions, 2010) is quick to set an irreverent though somewhat self-conscious tone that dominates the early chapters. The only child of “pseudo hippie,” “oddball” parents, the author recalls his early years as a self-described geek, punctuated by activities ranging from bassoon playing to marathon games of Dungeons & Dragons. His family relocated back and forth from Seattle to Nicaragua and later to the Chicago suburbs, where, as a teenager, he gained a modicum of social acceptance through his interest and emerging talent in dramatic arts: “I had moved from regular geek/nerd to the very top of the geek/nerd hierarchy, DRAMA geek/nerd.” These chapters feature over-the-top anecdotes, extended footnotes, and trivia lists, including “Compendium of Comic Sidekicks,” “The Greatest Albums of the Early Eighties,” and “Shitty Jobs” (busboy, security guard, dishwasher, traffic-counter guy). Unfortunately, these comedic devices seldom hit the hilarious marks he’s intending, and comparisons will likely be drawn to gifted humorists such as bestselling author and former Office alum Mindy Kaling. Wilson’s narrative gathers momentum and insight when he recounts his years as a drama student at NYU, which led to film and TV work. The author also provides vivid descriptions of working on the set of The Office and deeper revelations about his spiritual path.
Certainly for fans of The Office, but the amiable actor also offers thoughtful glimpses into the realities of the TV and film industry and an impassioned rationale for living an openly spiritual life.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95453-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
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