An uneven Hollywood memoir with a bit of divinity thrown in.
A tale of two Tobolowskys, divided by a positive midlife crisis.
In the author’s latest, ostensibly a memoir but difficult to characterize, prolific character actor Tobolowsky (The Dangerous Animals Club, 2012) revisits his past with an eye toward finding some order, and some religion, in the chaos. The first half of the book follows the author’s life from his childhood in Dallas to the heady years of his burgeoning acting career in the 1980s. In the second half, Tobolowsky focuses on people and concepts related, in some way or another, to his return to Judaism. The two halves are very different in tone, subject matter, and approach. The author’s banal account of his early career mirrors the sort of hedonistic life story one might expect from a baby boomer in the entertainment world: drugs, parties, and money (or the lack thereof) dominate many of the storylines. Readers will be only mildly amused by the time Tobolowsky quips, “do you know how hard it is to spend $800 a week on yourself when you are not buying cocaine? In 1985 dollars?” The concept of faith doesn’t figure largely in the author’s story until the mid-1990s and his rather sudden return to traditional Judaism. At this point, the memoir gains more gravity but also becomes less streamlined, turning from a TMZ–style tell-all to a collection of vignettes about faith, difficult decisions, and people important to him. To be sure, Tobolowsky includes some truly worthwhile stories, not the least of which is a lengthy treatment of an Auschwitz survivor he came to know and whose story he decided to share through film. The author succeeds as a writer in that his prose captures the imagination and keeps readers’ attention; as a memoir, however, the book is aimless, oddly structured, and only tangentially related to his supposed theme.
An uneven Hollywood memoir with a bit of divinity thrown in.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6646-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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