Pleasant but lightweight life of fat Ralph Kramden's creator, by the author of Salman Rushdie (1990), James Baldwin (1989), etc. Weatherby apparently twisted a scotch bottle dry with Gleason a number of times, starting back in Gleason's heyday, 1961, when the comedian was already questioning the value of gaining the world and would solemnly quote Shakespeare at length. Orson Welles dubbed Gleason ``the Great One'' and hoped someday to direct him as Falstaff, while Gleason tried to talk Welles into making Citizen Gleason. Weatherby has nailed the right interviews (Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, Mickey Rooney, Paul Newman, and others), but even so one can feel paste at the joins. Abandoned at nine by his father and an orphan at 19, Bushwick-born Gleason was stage-struck at seven, working as a stand-up comedian in his teens. Early marriage to a fellow Catholic he could not divorce brought him two daughters and long pain. Gleason bloomed in bistros, especially Toots Shor's, and always picked up the check, even when broke. Ralph Kramden, with his Depression-era kitchen, was the longest-running in a stable of Gleason creations, and when the comedian decided to stop doing Kramden at the height of his glory, CBS was stunned. Gleason said he feared running dry, as good an explanation as any. As a character actor, he enjoyed a mostly successful film career (e.g., as pool-shark Minnesota Fats in The Hustler) and did some hit stage turns. Late in life, the release of 120 ``lost'' early episodes of The Honeymooners he'd kept in an air-conditioned vault brought him renewed fame. Gleason died of cancer in 1987 at age 71. Gleason is an ever-compelling major comedian who still awaits the serious biographical attention given Keaton, Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy.
Pub Date: April 6, 1992
ISBN: 0-88687-655-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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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