A surprisingly charmless memoir by the longtime Carol Burnett Show costar and recent talk show host. The story of Lawrence's big break is a quintessential show-biz fairy tale. As a high school student, she sent a fan letter to Carol Burnett noting that everyone always commented on her resemblance to the actress. On a whim, Burnett came to see Lawrence in a Fireman's Ball beauty contest and eventually offered the 18- year-old a job on her new television variety program. Over The Carol Burnett Show's 11-year run, the hard-working Lawrence became a skillful supporting player and created at least one characterization—Mama in the ``Family'' sketches—that can justifiably be called classic. Given the rare good luck Lawrence generally encountered, it is particularly strange to find a large streak of anger and tell-all nastiness in her autobiography. She is especially bitter about her parents and sister, whom she savages at Roseanne-like length. Her mother's cruelty, her father's weakness, her sister's jealousy—the list goes on and on. But she also snipes at many co-workers, including Harvey Korman, whom she first praises for teaching her all she knows about comedy, then denigrates as a hopeless neurotic who was almost impossible to work with (she even notes in a superfluous aside that his wife had an affair with New York City Ballet dancer Edward Villella). Lawrence does have some kind words for a few—most notably Al Shultz, her husband of many years, and Burnett, who is otherwise a shadowy presence here—but a section at the book's close praising people she cares about seems too little, too late. The book is dedicated to Lawrence's fans, who may be startled by the woman they discover within. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80286-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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