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
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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