An entertaining if somewhat overly anecdotal look back at a beloved weekly variety series.
The TV legend reflects on her eponymous variety series.
When the Carol Burnett Show premiered on CBS in 1967, it was the heyday for variety shows, which mixed sketch comedy with musical performances and were a staple on network TV. Though several shows from that era enjoyed high ratings for a few seasons, such as Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and the Glen Campbell Show, Burnett’s (This Time Together: Laughter and Reflection, 2010, etc.) series remained an audience favorite for an unprecedented 11 years, winning multiple Emmy awards along the way and continuing in syndication ever since. In this light, behind-the-scenes memoir, the author pays tribute to the many talented individuals responsible for the show’s enduring success, including the writers, musicians, designers, technicians, and, perhaps most significantly, her team of weekly performers and big-name celebrity guest stars. She additionally shares some of the hilarious impromptu moments on the set and sheds light on the many memorable sketches, including the movie parodies that have become classic TV. In brief, occasionally disjointed chapters, Burnett provides fascinating glimpses of the vigorous demands involved with producing her show, eventually summarizing why such shows are regretfully no longer produced on the same scale. “Sadly, variety shows like ours have gone the way of the dodo bird,” she writes. “A variety show today can never duplicate what we did. Why? Money. The cost of clearing the songs and music would sink the Titanic. Sixty to seventy costumes a week? No way. A twenty-eight piece orchestra? Twelve dancers? A rep company of five? Six to eight sketches a show? Major guest stars? Block the entire show and rehearse with the orchestra in one day? The following day tape the whole shebang in two hours? Dream on.”
An entertaining if somewhat overly anecdotal look back at a beloved weekly variety series.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90465-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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