From the dental work and the tan to the madness in his humor as a TV personality and his gunslinging, Barris has always been...
Barris may well be living purely in his extravagant head, but this sequel to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1984) has enough off-balance humor and burnished bravado to keep readers tuned in.
As in that earlier “memoir,” the man who brought us The Gong Show, The Newlywed Game, and The Dating Game claims to also be a professional gunny for the US government, taking out bad guys and gals globally, intimately, and with what appears to be his tongue so firmly in his cheek, it’s a wonder it doesn’t rupture a vessel. The action proceeds from the mid-’70s through today, taking Barris from the top of the TV heap (where he was bored and disenchanted) through a pink slip from TV bigwigs to a spell in New York–Presbyterian’s ICU to marriage to the woman of his dreams. Along the way, during breaks from his game-hosting duties, Barris works as a CIA operative, a hit man ridding the planet of nefarious terrorist creatures. As a writer, Barris goes for the bluntly vivid: “Miguel Agular . . . was one despicable son of a bitch . . . a relentless, vicious little animal”; in Mexico City, “the streets were jammed packed with steaming people, the sidewalks with steaming dog shit.” As a Company man, he’s reluctant, because he’s getting old, but he takes assignments nevertheless, because if he doesn’t the CIA will whack him with the same insouciance it displays when killing terrorists. Barris is surprisingly good at painting character portraits of his CIA overseers and his quarries, but the story plays out over such tenuous, dreamy, comic terrain, it all feels like celluloid from the start. Not so his relationships with women, each depicted as a genuine person rather than a trophy, nor his visit with lung cancer.
From the dental work and the tan to the madness in his humor as a TV personality and his gunslinging, Barris has always been touched by the surreal, and it fits foursquare into this piece of work.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1379-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
