Clearly, watching Bourdain’s shows was nothing like living them, as this high-flying memoir amply demonstrates.
The food-and-travel icon’s longtime director and producer delivers a memoir of incomparable travelogues snatched from the clutch of chaos.
Vitale was consumed by his work with Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018), an adrenalin-fueled ride through three broadcast series in which recklessness was as much a virtue as creativity. Traveling up to 250 days per year, risking life and limb, often in some of the most perilous places in the world, the director of No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknownflirted with nervous breakdowns and imminent catastrophe as Bourdain constantly increased the stakes on whatever project was at hand. Vitale’s memoir of those years—and of the vacuum in his life following Bourdain’s suicide—is a fascinating insider’s account of the making of groundbreaking TV. It is also the most complete picture yet of Bourdain’s complex and conflicted character—along with Laurie Woolever’s oral biography, Bourdain, publishing in the same month. “Tony was naturally telegenic,” writes Vitale, “possessing an unmistakable star quality….But even more alluring was his antagonistic, devil-may-care, combative relationship with the very machine that created his fame.” Vitale’s writing is seductively alive, pulsating with events and vividly rendered observations of people and exotic locales, hairbreadth escapes, and all the high-wire escapades, cultural revelations, and ethical questions that accompanied being Bourdain’s traveling companion. Everything that could go wrong generally did, yet that frequently resulted in a better product than the original script. Vitale admits that he struggled to articulate his own story, but if he was worried he was not up to the challenge, he can put those fears to rest. Drawn from show footage, notebooks, logs, travel itineraries, e-mails, and old receipts, his book is thrilling, sobering, harrowing, and as entertainingly frenetic as the events described, a tale told by a survivor still trying to make sense of it all.
Clearly, watching Bourdain’s shows was nothing like living them, as this high-flying memoir amply demonstrates.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-306-92409-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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