Mildly amusing and affable to a fault, Conway’s tome joins the massive pile of inessential showbiz memoirs.
The celebrated funnyman on his frictionless life and times.
With the assistance of veteran co-author Scovell (Samuel Ramey, American Bass, 2010, etc.), Conway breezily recounts his career in show business, especially his 11 years on the Carol Burnett Show. The author is pleasant company, but the jokes are pitched to raise a wry grin rather than evoke belly laughs, the showbiz anecdotes are free from salaciousness and scandal, and the personal history yields neither engagement nor insight. The result is a relentlessly genial and inconsequential catalog of mild pranks, warm friendships and highlights of a comfortable career as a midlevel, familiar TV performer. To his credit, Conway realizes his status as a solid supporting player and is charmingly self-effacing about his lack of success as a leading man, but the lack of dramatic stakes eventually produces a soporific effect. The author heaps praise and affection on co-stars like Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman, but he declines to analyze the comedy or production of the immensely popular Carol Burnett Show, and the material reads more like a testimonial than a behind-the-scenes look at a comedy institution. There are chuckles to be had at Conway’s misadventures in the Army, on the golf course and at the racetrack, but the book’s richest material concerns his early upbringing in Ohio and his eccentric immigrant parents. The author paints affectionate portraits of his hapless Irish father and dynamic Romanian mother, a quirky yet loving couple and perhaps a more compelling subject for a memoir than the agreeable but toothless entertainment memoir on offer here.
Mildly amusing and affable to a fault, Conway’s tome joins the massive pile of inessential showbiz memoirs.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2650-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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