Raunchy, disorderly memoir from the man who bestowed The Gong Show, The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and other entertainments on the American public. Barris devotes much—too much—space here to his recent retirement years in St. Tropez, focusing on his friendships with some eccentric Frenchman and his obsession with the game of boule. He also ventures such comments on his current hosts as, ``Frenchmen never change their clothes...And Frenchmen don't bathe, at least most of the Parisian taxi drivers don't.'' But the one-time (mostly 70's) Nielsen darling hasn't completely forgotten his audience, and in between the French sections he serves up a ribald account of his time at the top, going right for the groin on his opening page, a description of the notorious episode on The Gong Show (on which bad acts performed until a celebrity judge slammed a mallet into a giant gong) that featured the Popsicle Twins, pretty teenagers who performed fellatio on orange popsicles. Readers who venture further will learn about the early days of Barris's first show, The Dating Game, originally plagued by obscenity-spouting contestants; about the author's first big TV special, featuring rock-'n'-roller Cass Elliot, who ``was most definitely fat. And dank''; about how Barris was masturbated during dinner by a 17-year-old ``with the face of a sad horse'' while future Hollywood powerhouse Mike Medavoy danced with a lampshade on his head; and about how, back in France, Ted Kennedy cavorted on Barris's yacht. There's a bit of introspection, too (``some of those antics of mine can make me moan with embarrassment''), perhaps prompted by a 60-ish Barris's recent, failed comeback attempt, schlepping projects around L.A. to no avail. Which isn't surprising, judging from this latest Barris product, which deserves, with little ado, a big...Gong! (Photographs—not seen) (First printing of 40,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-7867-0002-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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