Lenz’s debut memoir recounts his four decades on the stage and screen.
Brushes with greatness are a recurring theme throughout Lenz’s reflection on a lifetime playing Hollywood bit parts and regional theater roles. Among the memories: an old friendship with Goldie Hawn, a fight scene with John Wayne and a bout of drinking with Jason Robards and George C. Scott. Lenz concedes that he peaked early, however, gaining minor buzz in the late 1960s as an up-and-coming actor only to follow a trajectory that delivered lots of work but not much acclaim. “My God, people listened when I spoke,” he recalls in one wistful memory of early promise. “Naturally, I assumed this was the way it would always be.” Instead, Lenz was relegated to endless auditions and decades of journeyman roles in TV series like Marcus Welby, MD, The Six Million Dollar Man and Falcon Crest. His story is freighted with disappointment, although the author blames only himself for some of his bad breaks. These include the decision to pass on a stage opportunity with a well-known Hollywood director for a lead role in a Kansas City dinner-theater production of The Owl and the Pussy Cat. Lenz uses the present tense to suitable effect in sustaining immediacy between flashbacks from decades ago and more recent events, and he documents a career longevity that is breathtaking. He writes with self-punishing honesty in places, opening up about substance abuse, failed marriages and troubled children. He describes visiting a Los Angeles speakeasy to revel in his notoriety as a working actor only to have his bubble burst by a drunken community college professor who taunts him for not being better known. “You know what you are? You’re a loser.” It’s a slap in the face, but it lends Lenz the clarity to see that fame isn’t everything. His story is more about self-acceptance than glory, and readers will cheer Lenz as he reaches that realization himself.
A touching, bittersweet remembrance of a workaday career in acting.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0984844203
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Chromodroid Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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